


Something by the Sea

by destielpasta



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Communication, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotions, Flashbacks, M/M, POV Dean Winchester, Slow Burn, post-season 9
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-27
Updated: 2015-10-27
Packaged: 2018-04-26 23:26:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 30,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5024728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destielpasta/pseuds/destielpasta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>But Ruth said, 'Do not press me to leave you and to stop going with you, for wherever you go, I shall go, wherever you live, I shall live. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Where you die, I shall die and there I shall be buried. Let Yahweh bring unnameable ills on me and worse ills, too, if anything but death should part me from you.'</i>
</p><p> </p><p>  <i>Seeing that Ruth was determined to go with her, Naomi said no more.</i></p><p> </p><p>- Book of Ruth, Chapter 1</p><p>After suffering the horrific cost of being cured from demonhood, Dean and Cas settle down in the small town of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, buying a run-down shack near the beach to call their own. Dean attempts to get into a normal routine– fixing up the kitchen, chopping wood for the fire, and picking out paint colors– all with the pleasant backdrop of Cas’s company and a beach fifty feet away. These things prove themselves to be fragile, however, and the past haunts Dean in the form of nightmares and strange phone-calls from an untraceable number, along with the far-from-innocent history of their new house.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This is my second year completing a Big Bang, and as always I need to thank everyone who cheerleaded me and dried my tears along the way. This wouldn't be possible without the amazing friendship of Em, Musey, Stiney, and Maggie, for making sure I didn't go writer crazy and provided advice and encouragement along the way. Just by being amazing friends and giving me good sense of what relationships are you inspire my writing and are truly amazing. You all play such a big part in making me the writer than I am and I can't thank you enough for it. I also need to thank my amazing betas Jess (deanhugchester) and Jess (museaway) for all their insight and for playing a BIG part in making this story polished in the end. 
> 
> The art for this fic was done by the amazing and hardworking [busysquirrelpress](http://busysquirrelpress.tumblr.com/). Please feel free to shower her with praise with at the [Art Masterpost](http://busysquirrel.livejournal.com/981.html). 
> 
> This fic includes themes that center around a major character death that occurs before the start of the fic. It is not Dean or Cas. If you would like to know the nature of the death, **please hover over this text.**
> 
> The majority of this fic takes place in two locations in Maine-- Old Orchard Beach and Auburn. I have been to place place multiple times, but I am not a Maine native and took a lot of liberties with location, ESPECIALLY the location of the house. I hope I capture the spirit of these wonderful places, however, and if you ever get a chance to visit I sincerely hope you do!
> 
> Thank you for reading! Feel free to follow me on tumblr at [destiepasta](http://destielpasta.tumblr.com/).

_It’s funny, Sam thinks, that they find Dean by the ocean._

_Beach trips weren’t commonplace in their childhood. John (obviously) didn’t make them a priority, unless there was a case worth leaving the landlocked midwest. They’d seen plenty of lakes and ponds and haunted campsites and the Great Lakes were a site to see, for sure, but rarely the ocean._

_So seeing him, eyes black as the churning surf behind him and lips curled against the gust of wind coming off the water, it feels… strange. Anticlimactic, even. It certainly looks like his brother, and he hasn’t seen him in months. His body tries to feel relief, but he’s too strung out. Too exhausted._

_There’s also the point that this isn’t Dean. Not in the slightest._

_“When’s the last time we took a vacation, Sammy?” he calls, his voice deeper than normal._

_“Never,” Sam calls back, voice clipped. He can do this. He can draw it out, bring Dean into the light–  if only he had more energy, this would be so much easier–_

_Dean steps closer, walking into the leftover light of a streetlamp a few yards away. He holds the first blade like an extension of his arm, and an ugly sneer contorts his face._

_“How’s this for a vacation, Sammy?” he calls again._

_Sam swallows, wishing he had something to lean on as his legs shake. He can only watch and hope his body holds on as long as they need._

_Cas emerges from the shadows behind Dean, wrapping his arms around him and making his eyes glow bright. Sam squints at the sigil drawn in the sand, all jagged lines almost invisible in the darkness. Dean sags, putting up a struggle before falling unconscious. Sam moves toward them as if through water._

_“You could have picked somewhere warmer,” he mutters, words lost to the wind._


	2. Chapter 2

It’s the off season. Whatever that means. 

“It’s the off season,” the realtor repeats as Dean ducks through the almost crumbling threshold. She had already said it once as they walked up the grass-covered path and would say it twice more: once when Cas sticks his head into the bathroom to peer at the moldy shower and again when Dean sees the price tag. 

“That’s… _pretty_ cheap,” he says, ogling at the four-figure sum she points to on the sales brochure, “Does it turn into 1972 in the off season here?”

Cas laughs behind him, more of an exhale in the way he won’t let himself full on laugh but still wants them to know that he finds the situation amusing. The realtor–  Shirley, Dean remembers–  doesn’t smile, her eyes downcast. 

“I know this looks odd,” she says, hands full of forms, “The owners want to sell as quickly as possible and as long as you’re ok with the work and no inspection, the price stays the same.”

Dean glances at the the kitchen wall closest to the living room, eyes catching on the blackened drywall. 

Shirley interrupts his staring contest with the clack of her heels as she moves in front of the offending wall. “Just a small kitchen fire–  it didn’t even really damage the drywall.”

Dean clears his throat. “That so?”

“Yes. And all it needs is a cleaning and a good coat of paint.”

“Hm.”

Dean turns, looking to get Cas’s opinion on the whole strange situation since they saw the ad in the paper, instead finding him standing by the window with his back toward him. He had thrown open the large window in the living room while Dean talked with the realtor, staring out at the blue-grey waves crashing against the sand, hands resting on the worn sill. 

Dean inhales, feeling his chest fill with air as if he had stopped breathing a moment before. The sea-scented air ruffles Cas’s hair and messes with the worn collar of his shirt. 

Dean turns back to the realtor, hands shaking as he reaches into his pocket. So many people would call him crazy, but since when did he listen to common sense?

“We’ll take it.”

Shirley’s eyes widen, but she hastens to gather up the forms for him to sign. He takes her pen and squints at the small type, searching for the place to sign. Swiping an initial here and there, he glances back at the blackened wall. He sniffs, and the skin on his arm twitches.

He looks away, but his arm still aches from holding the pen. 

After he finishes, Shirley sits down on a metal folding chair–  the only seating available in the kitchen to speak of besides the stacks of junk and cardboard boxes–  to organize a few more forms and make a quick call to the owners about Dean and Cas moving in right away. She talks in a hushed voice, muttering about ‘all cash,’ and Dean takes the hint to give her a minute’s privacy. Hopefully they had spent their last night in a motel for a while. 

He wanders into the living room, taking note of the worn but decent carpeting and the walls that desperately needed a paint job. He ponies up beside Cas at the window, nudging him to the side with a gentle push of his shoulder. He takes in the view, keen to see what Cas seems intent on staring at all day. 

“Like what you see?” he asks, gesturing to the crashing waves seen through the thin line of trees. 

“Yes,” Cas answers immediately. His eyes soften, however, and he turns toward Dean. “We could keep looking, though. There’s no reason why we have to stay _here_.”

Dean shakes his head, nerves settling in his stomach. He ignores them. 

“It’s as good as anything.”

Cas smiles, nodding and turning back to the view. “I’m glad you want to stay.”

“Yeah, me too,” Dean says, rubbing the back of his neck. A gull touches down on a tree branch not too far from the window. “I’m just glad we saw the ad in the paper. I don’t wanna mislead you–  beachfront property doesn’t usually come this cheap. Or secluded.”

“Even in the off season?” Cas repeats, voice stoic but his eyes playful.

“Yeah, smart ass, even in the off season.”

Cas smiles for real and crosses his arms, the motion making their upper arms touch. A breeze rushes through the window, sending a chill down Dean’s spine. 

“Mr. Warren?” Shirley calls from the kitchen, “I just need one more signature.”

“Coming,” he calls back, hesitating only barely at the sound of his fake name. Cas turns back to the window; he doesn’t have a name to sign. 

Shirley holds a clipboard out to him, already flipped to the last page of the thick packet of forms. She had printed his name, and Dean wonders whether he should be taking the time to actually read through the damn thing. Sam would have dissected it in its entirety–  hurling question after question at the realtor until her head started spinning. 

He puts the thought out of his mind before swiping one last signature without looking at much else. Shirley inspects paper one last time, finding it without flaw. 

“All set with that. The owners are ok with you moving in right away, as long as you have the earnest money before final closing in a few days. You'll have to meet with the notary in town.” She fidgets. “You said you’ll be paying in cash?” she prompts.

“Yup,” Dean reaches into his back pocket, pulling out a worn legal envelope. Shirley’s eyes widen in surprise as he counts out the right number of bills and hands them to her.

She clears her throat uncomfortably, tucking the bills into a blue, zipper-topped bag. His shoulders relax as the money disappears, feeling nothing but relief to see it go. 

“Well, good luck!” Shirley says, shaking Dean’s hand and saying goodbye to Cas on her way out. They’re left alone in the house, with only the fading sound of her clacking heels against the stone path.

Dean stares at the blackened wall, as if it could tell him a story or two. 

 

 

* * *

Dean finds one ancient airbed in the Impala’s trunk (one of the army surplus kind that could survive a nuclear war) and buys another (significantly cheaper, but bigger) at a Walmart just outside of town while getting some groceries. When he gets back, he lines cereal boxes and a bag of coffee up on the counter along with a loaf of bread and puts the carton of milk, eggs, and butter in the ancient fridge. 

He jots down a to-do list while sitting on the folding chair, absentmindedly scraping soot from one of the legs. 

  1. Haul out broken tiles. 
  2. Clear out closets.
  3. Scrub down bathroom. 
  4. Wash walls. 



He looks at it sideways, head cocked. His handwriting is shit. When was the last time he actually wrote something out?

“What are you doing?”

He looks up. Cas stands in small stretch of hallway between the living room and kitchen, hands awkward by his sides. 

“Making a list of stuff we need to do,” Dean says, “For the house.”

Cas nods. He does that a lot lately, having developed an entire repertoire of body language when he was human; traits Dean still has to get used to.

He eventually comes to stand by Dean, squatting back on his heels to peer at his to-do list. He gives him a few suggestions, taking the pen from him adding them in cramped print. ‘Planting a Garden’ (“Might have to wait for summer with that one, Cas.”) and ‘washing the windows’ make the cut, but Dean draws the line at ‘get a welcome mat.’

“You don’t want our home to be welcoming?” Cas asks with such innocence Dean knows it must be an act. 

“We can make it welcoming in other ways, believe me,” Dean retorts, “Like with a Devil’s Trap by the door for any rabid demons that try something stupid. They’ve got nowhere to go now, thanks to you.”

It’s meant to be a joke, but Dean feels it fall flat before the words even leave his mouth. Cas’s eyes take on a shadowed look, and he picks at a stray thread on Dean’s sleeve. 

“Forget I said it,” Dean says, pulling away and watching the thread slip through Cas’s fingers. 

They set the air mattresses up in the living room, still separated from the bedroom by a door that needs a key and Dean is loathe to find out what waits behind it. More work, definitely, and for now they need sleep. Cas builds a fire in the woodstove, muttering safety directions and something about carbon monoxide poisoning before closing the windows and fitting loose-weave blankets into the cracks to keep out the chill. October approaches with a biting chill, especially at night.

Dean spreads out on the old twin-size mattress, nudging the full size one toward Cas. He rolls his eyes, but stretches out on it all the same. Soon, Dean hears steady breathing. 

He doubts he’ll even adjust to the sound of waves crashing outside the window, dulled as it is from the blankets lining the windows. Shirley promised that the tide never never comes up as far as the house, but how reliable are the words of a realtor selling a falling-down house?

He hears a buzzing, his phone vibrating against the carpet a few feet away from him. He reaches out, his back protesting the awkward angle, but the vibrating stops before he can answer it. The screen reads that he has a missed call from an _Unknown Caller_ , with no callback number given. He throws the phone back on the floor, feeling slightly annoyed. 

He rolls over, away from the window, wincing when he presses his weight down on his bad arm. 

Cas sits up, just an outline in the darkness. 

“Are you alright?” he asks.

“Peachy.”

Dean lies back, turning away from Cas’s worried eyes, relieved when he hears the sound of him settling in again. 

* * *

 

 

The next day dawns somewhat warmer than the last, the remains of summer leaking into a damp and chilly Autumn. Dean lies back with his eyes closed, enjoying the swirl of lights behind his eyelids and the inevitable sway of his body on the air mattress. 

“Is this similar to camping?”

Dean groans. So much for peace. 

He sits up, rubbing sleep from his eyes and taking in the sight of Cas sitting on the side of his air mattress, legs stretched in front of him. He looks toward the window, facing the sun filtering inside. 

“What?” Dean asks. 

“Camping,” Cas says with an uptilt to his voice, “I was wondering if this was anything like it.”

“Uhhh…” Dean looks around the homely looking living room, its walls yellow with age and the carpet worn into footpaths. The kitchen looms behind them, promising days and days of work that makes Dean want to hide back under the covers. 

“No,” he says, “This is more like squatting.”

“Except we own the house.” Cas turns, smiling and squinting from the sun. The sun picks up the lighter parts of his hair. 

Dean swallows. “You got it.”

Cas makes a nondescript noise and rises. He pads into the kitchen, his bare feet approaching the broken and jagged tiles. Dean’s protective instincts blare like sirens, but he keeps it to himself. Cas should have angelic pain sensors or something to help with that. 

Dean waits for a pained gasp, or a curse, but it never comes. 

He reaches into one of their duffel bags, pulling out a pair of socks and slipping them on before following Cas into the kitchen. Upon closer inspection, he notices that the tiles are not nearly as bad as the char on the walls. Suddenly, he wants it gone, the itching in his hands to find a hammer and gut the whole thing overwhelming enough to have him reaching for the chair and falling into it before his legs give out. 

Then, as if from nowhere, there’s warmth as Cas pushes a steaming mug of coffee into his hands. 

“How’d you get this? And the stove’s not even hooked up.” he says, holding the mug like a bomb. 

Cas smiles, sipping from his own mug and leaning against the counter. “The stove is electric. All I had to do was plug it in. Shirley gave us a number to call to get the electric bill transferred to your name. _That_ ,” He jerks his head towards the ivory-colored percolator that looks straight out of the 80s, “Was under the sink.” 

Dean smiles back, sipping at the coffee. It’s probably the weakest coffee he’s ever tasted, but he just nods and keeps drinking. Cas will get the hang of it soon. 

“You ready to work?” Dean asks while Cas opens the kitchen window, letting in a burst of salty air. Cas breathes deep and grabs a granola bar from a box on the counter, tossing another to dean. 

“Can’t do anything on an empty stomach,” he says, tearing the wrapper off with gusto. 

Watching Cas chow down on a peanut-butter-chocolate-corn-syrup bar doesn’t do much to quell Dean’s nerves, especially with the recent increase in Cas’s food intake. 

“We haven’t gone down to the beach yet,” Cas continues, oblivious to Dean’s worries. “I’ve heard having a beach house is desireable. And we have one.” 

“Go on ahead. No one’s stopping you.”

Cas hesitates, shrugging and rubbing the back of his neck. “I already went by myself earlier this morning. I wanted to see what you thought of it.”

Dean clenches his jaw, ticking shrugging off his invisible list of human habits. Cas wants to get him out of the house, sure, and Dean can see why, but they’ve got work to do. 

He takes a deep breath. He can handle it. 

“Tell you what,” Dean says, making an effort to keep his voice light, “Let’s get on a reward system here. We clear all the junk out of the kitchen, then we go down to the beach.”

Cas smirks, and it’s more natural this time. 

“Ok.”

Ask anyone in the history of the universe, and they would tell you that _everything_ is easier said than done. They carry out box after box of unlabeled junk, hastily packed without much thought to organization. Cas hauls away two singed (and useless) kitchen chairs leaning up against the wall while Dean tries to ignore how blackened their legs look, swallowing back the lumps that form in his throat. 

By the time the kitchen is clear of junk, the heat of the day is in full swing. Cas grits his teeth against it, muttering something about how _it was supposed to be cool in Maine_ , stripping off his overshirt and wiping his forehead with it. Dean does the same, watching Cas with his old shirt in hand, the strangeness of the situation settling in without warning. The Cas he knew before would not have broken a sweat. 

Cas turns and smiles, making the nerves in Dean’s stomach surge up again with a vengeance. The surf slams against the beach in the distance, loud from the open window thrown open to let in the resulting breeze. 

“What?” he asks, turning away without waiting for the answer. 

“Nothing,” Cas says, and Dean feels his gaze on his back while he cups his hands under the faucet to get a drink of water. 

The moment passes, Cas slipping out the back door and coming back with a rusted garden hoe. 

“Do you think we can remove the tile with this?” he asks.

Dean shrugs. “Only one way to find out.”

The tile, broken as it is, comes up without much stubbornness, the mortar  job obviously not professional. Dean smashes the remaining pieces while Cas works it up off the ground with glove-covered hands. They throw everything into old-looking garbage pails out back, and Dean can’t help but think of it as waste. The tile had probably been nice looking once and now they have no kitchen floor, but it didn’t do them any favors to walk on sharp edges either. 

The floor left behind is rough from the remaining mortar, and Dean tries to remember whether he has ever tiled a floor. He doesn’t fully trust his memory, but it’s turning towards no. 

He goes to ask Cas how he feels about the project, when he spots him across the room, staring at the back of the TSP cleaner Shirley left them to clean the soot covered walls. _Just a minor fire_ , her voice echoes in his head. He spies a skull and crossbone warning on the back of the bottle. 

Dean blinks at the wall, the peachy-salmon paint deepening into charred black and gray. 

“Maybe tomorrow,” he blurts out, Cas turns, eyebrows furrowed, “Cleaning the walls I mean. We need gloves and masks. We can go to the store.”

Cas frowns. “Dean, I could–”

“No.”

“But–”

“Shut up,” Dean says, and Cas purses his lips, “You’re not wasting whatever juice you got left on a dirty wall. We can fix it.”

“It would be quick,” Cas says, but his resolve appears to be fading.

“A little more work won’t kill us. The wall isn’t hurting us the way it is for right now.”

Cas sighs, but he doesn’t push further. Instead he turns away from the wall, surveying the space. 

“We can scrub the cabinets and they’ll be all good to go,” Dean says, “And then all we need is a coat of paint and some kind of floor… for now we’ll have to wear shoes in the kitchen. But I don’t think there’s anything else we can do right now…” he trails off, and Cas smirks like a kid in a candy store. 

Dean sighs, faking annoyance. “Alright, let’s go down to the fucking water.”

Cas smiles in earnest, and he keeps tidying up the kitchen while Dean pulls on his boots. He’s looking at them, realizing that he has no beach-type shoes, when a buzzing interrupts his thoughts. He looks around, finding the source in a few seconds: his phone, charged but unused for months, not since he had handed his phone to Cas to tell the hunters network that he was fucking retired. 

_Unknown Caller_ flashes across the screen, just as it had the night before. He’s far more awake now, however, and he grimaces with confusion before pressing the talk button. 

“Hello?”

Nothing but static greets him from the other end, grainy and consistent. 

“Who is this?” 

More static fills the line before it cuts off with a resounding _click_. The call goes dead, as if the other line had lost service. He hangs up, setting the phone back on the counter. 

“Who was it?” Cas asks. 

Dean shakes his head, swallowing hard. “Nothing. Wrong number. You ready to go?”

Cas looks concerned but doesn’t make Dean elaborate. Instead he beckons for Dean to follow him, walking down the path towards the beach as if he had to physically keep himself from taking it at a run. Dean follows next to him, hands shoved deep in his pockets. It occurs to Dean that nothing is truly new to Cas; he’s seen beaches before, maybe even _this_ beach, with dinosaurs on it or something. 

As soon as Dean steps onto the sand he relaxes, inhaling deep and letting his shoulders drop. They toe off their boots and leave their socks inside them. The sand is nothing special, coarse and frequently broken up by rocks, shells, and clumps of seaweed. It still feels good between his toes. 

Cas plops down a few yards away from the surf, oblivious to or not minding that sand has the ability to get anywhere and everywhere. Dean joins him, watching as the sun sinks more and more towards the horizon. 

The ocean is too cold to swim in except during the dead heat of summer, Shirley said while they looked at the house. _Maybe not even then_ , he remembers her saying, making it a far cry from the tropical oasis he had once pictured himself obtaining to settle down. That had been a different dream, with a different person. 

This water takes on the steely blue and grays of the Autumn sky, its waves crashing into foam against the beach. Wind kicks up, flapping at the worn neckline of his t-shirt and making him wish he had brought his flannel outside. He wraps his arms around his knees and shivers through it. 

“Maine is beautiful this time of year,” Cas says, resting his head on his knees. 

Dean laughs, rubbing his hands together against the chill. “How do you reckon that?”

“Everything is a shade of blue. Or gray. Even the rocks and trees know that winter is coming.”

“Alright, Ned Stark.”

“I understand your references now, Dean.”

Dean laughs, and they fall silent, watching as the tide moves closer and closer. He makes a mental note to pick up a tide chart. The foam swirls and mixes with the sand, and in the growing sunset Dean swears that the water looks red. 

_What, like a vacation?_

The memory sneaks up with warning, tethering him to the ground like a million small hooks digging into the sand. 

“Dean?”

He hears Cas as though through a thick glass window, more focused on the ghost of a blade resting in his hand and the burning in his right forearm. The hilt burns red-hot, molded perfectly as if a part of the bone and muscle underneath it. 

_“Dean.”_

He snaps out of it, as quick as he had fallen, a blunt pain at his wrist grounding him. He looks down, seeing where Cas’s hand is wrapped around his wrist like a vice. Dean racks his brain for an explanation. 

“Are you alright?” Cas asks, dipping his head to catch Dean’s eye. 

“Yeah,” he says, pulling his hand from Cas’s and wrapping an arm around his legs, hugging them to his chest. “Just watching the water, is all.”

He can see Cas deliberate, thinking about the motion before he makes it. He lifts a hand and it settles on Dean’s shoulder like a dead weight before Dean relaxes under the touch. He bites his lip, trying to keep his eyes forward like a good soldier while Cas moves his hand in small circles. He leans into it, regardless. 

Evening comes quick over the ocean, especially with everything smelling like winter. They make their way back, the kitchen looking barren and dingey when it had been full of potential in the sunlight. The charred wall stares down at Dean like a third occupant. 

“I found these in the Impala,” Cas says as he walks back in through the front door, examining the back of a soup can, “The expiration day could be 2015… or 2013.”

Dean sags, taking the cans and rummaging through a drawer for an opener. Cas locates a lone saucepan in the cupboard under the sink, and after a good scrubbing, it works fine to heat up the soup. 

They eat next to the woodstove, Cas building up the fire again with wood from the large pile outside of the house. The wind whistles through the cracks in the window sills, making Dean wonder if he’d be able to fix it with some caulk, or if he should just buy stock in firewood. 

“We should go to the store tomorrow,” Cas says after a few minutes, leaning over his mostly empty bowl of soup.

“Yeah,” Dean says, leaning away, “Hardware store at least.”

Cas nods, appearing neutral about the amount of work ahead of them. The kitchen sits half-done and torn apart and the bedroom remains a mystery behind a locked door. Dean has the key to open it, but not the energy to confront it. 

He’s only somewhat aware of Cas taking his empty bowl, the day’s work catching up to him. His muscles ache in a way not entirely unpleasant, however, and he lies back on the air mattress, slinging an arm over his eyes succumbing to sleep. 

 

* * *

It always starts with pain. Sharp and burning, it tears through muscle and bone just above his wrist and below his elbow. He twists and pulls, the sound of his own snarls rough and wild to his ears, but the handcuffs only chafe at his wrists, unyielding. He finds himself rattling them just to keep sane; to hear something besides his own screams.

_Dean!_

_Sam, there has to be another way–_

_Stop! We’re not losing him!_

_Sam–_

_Cas, I can do this._

The pain comes in a package deal with the memories: blood on his hands and blood in black cups bubbling with Crowley’s orders and demands for more souls. With a snap of his fingers, Crowley brought Dean to his knees, ordering him to collect for him. He slashed throats and tore out eyes, the screams of his victims music to his ears and how _wonderful_ it felt to see life leaving a body– 

He always asked victims before the life them their bodies: _Had the deal been worth this?_

“Dean!”

The voice brings him out of it, the dream still thick like a blanket over his eyes, but he recognizes it for what it is, just a dream. 

“ _Dean,_ you need to turn over, you’re going to–”

Cas’s warning comes too late. Dean tastes the bile before his body starts to heave, and a pair of hands help him to his feet as hot vomit drips down his mouth and into the neck of his shirt. He stumbles on the lip between the kitchen and the threshold of the bathroom door, thanking God that the plumbing is functional because he retches again, emptying the contents of his stomach into the toilet bowl. 

He grips the porcelain, head still swimming. The tile floor dances under his eyes, doubling and folding in on itself like a kaleidoscope. He retches one more time, spilling liquid into the toilet, his stomach empty of anything substantial. 

He sits back on his heels, wiping his mouth with the back of his arm and feeling disgusted with himself. He hears a sigh behind him, muffled as though through a hand; as if he hadn’t been supposed to hear it at all. He turns, and Cas sits on the side of the tub, watching him. 

“You could have choked,” he says. 

“I’ll do better next time,” Dean snaps back, his voice no more than a rasp.

“Fuck you, Dean,” Cas says without force, almost like an exhale. Regardless, the words are ugly coming from his mouth, and he kicks a loose tile before standing up and storming out. The door slams back against the wall. 

Dean rests his head on his arm, cognizant of how gross he feels but too weak to do much about it. The nightmare still pulses through him, hot and cold like the racks of hell. He’d take hell over this; at least he’d been acting like a local then. As a demon he’d killed _people_ –  people who had wanted to find love or success or cure their loved ones of cancer. He had ripped their throats out like a hellhound, laughing over their corpses. 

And he remembers every bit of it. 

Minutes pass before Cas comes back, bypassing his previous spot to sit on the floor next to Dean.

“I must look like hell,” Dean scoffs. He cleaned the puke from his face and flushed the toilet, but got a look at his bloodshot eyes and blotchy skin in the mirror. 

Cas doesn’t seem fazed. “I’m sorry,” he says. 

“Cas–”

Cas cuts him off by taking Dean’s face in his hands, the palms warm and dry against his skin. Dean’s eyes flutter shut at the sensation, warmth spreading from his face to his toes. His nausea disappears, and his eyes shoot open. 

He shakes Cas’s hands off of him, ears burning. 

“Cas, _fuck_ , you can’t just waste it like that.”

Cas cocks his head to the side, letting his hands fall back into his lap. 

“But what am I going to do with it now, Dean?”

Dean shakes his head, hating the situation. Hating that he wants to feel Cas’s hands back on his face, without him wasting whatever little angelic power he has left. 

He shivers. Cas’s hands weren’t soft in his nightmare. They were hard and cold and without mercy, and then Dean had seen them turn white in desperation, his brother lying prone– 

“I can still feel that sigil,” Dean says instead. “Like a hook in my stomach.”

Cas swallows, staring at the wall. “We were dealing with a Knight of Hell.”

Dean nods. “Yeah. I guess you were.”

Cas doesn’t meet his eyes, instead getting up and rummaging through a box of towels they had picked up from the Goodwill. He runs under the faucet, waiting enough time for it to be warm. Dean considers standing up, making what Cas was about to do easier, but doesn’t feel entirely charitable enough. 

So Cas stoops down again, cleaning whatever puke was left from Dean’s face and neck, making quick work of it before extending his hand. Dean glares at it a few moments, contemplating spending the night in the bathtub, before taking it and letting Cas pull him up. 

He leads him back to the living room, the fire still going. Dean stands, swaying it the heat, wishing he had the energy to crack a window while Cas sifts through a duffel bag. He pulls out a clean t-shirt and offers it to Dean. He takes it, shedding the soiled one and throwing it into the trash. Cas follows it with his eyes. 

“I don’t have the energy to clean a disgusting piece of clothing that’s already ten years old,” Dean snaps, knowing he’s being wasteful.

Cas pauses, thoughtful. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, Dean.”

Dean pulls the shirt over his head, turning away to hide the growing wetness in his eyes. The warmth of Cas’s hands return, however, and he allows himself to be guided down onto his bed and arranged back into a sleep position. Cas’s touches are casual, but Dean’s too exhausted to pretend that he doesn’t enjoy the way his hands skim over his arms and neck. 

Cas leaves after a while, taking the warmth with him. Sparks light up the night when he drops another log into the stove, and Dean succumbs to sleep again. 

 


	3. Chapter 3

Dean’s regular neck ache greets him in the morning, along with a mouth that tastes strongly of feet. All easily fixed luckily, unlike the pit of nerves settling in his stomach. He closes his eyes, willing his muscles to relax. It fails, and he sits up instead, adjusting his shirt from where it rode up in the night. He hears some rustling coming from the kitchen, but otherwise the house sits still. 

Cas emerges from the kitchen holding a bowl, cereal sloshing up the sides. When he notices Dean awake, he makes a gesture with a full mouth, silently asking if Dean would like some too. 

“No thanks man,” Dean says, holding up a hand, his voice falsely chipper, “Stomach’s still a little messed up.” 

Cas leans against the window sill, taking huge bites. His hair glistens from a recent shower, and the sight of Cas eating without inhibition does nothing to settle Dean’s nerves. Cas notices after a moment, abandoning the bowl on the floor. 

“We should go through the boxes on the porch before it rains,” Cas says, looking out the window towards the porch, “See if there’s anything we can use.”

Dean nods, reaching for his clothes. 

And that’s the story of how they become the proud owners of an array of mismatched silverware, a set of soot-covered but otherwise fine Correll china, two orange lamps that look right of the seventies, and dusty print of a dog running with a small boy on the beach. Dean cocks his head, studying it, and he’s reminded of all the prints he’s see in subpar hotels. 

He’ll keep it. 

Cas puts other things aside that Dean already placed in the toss pile: an old Betty Crocker cookbook, a semi-complete set of Harry Potter books, and a box of inexplicably ugly Christmas sweaters. Dean eyes them with a raised eyebrow, but Cas merely shrugs. 

“It’ll be cold soon. Then you’ll thank me.”

Dean rolls his eyes, not wanting to delve into the subject of how sensitive Cas is to temperature these days. All things better left unsaid, if you ask him. 

The sky swirls with white and gray clouds, a mimicry of the churning ocean. Dean appreciates that the house faces the beach, rather than the sparse woods and cracked highway. He leans against the porch bannister, eyeing up the paint job. It could definitely use some touching up in a big way. Maybe when Spring comes they can even get some furniture and watch the waves when the weather is nice enough.

Dean reaches for last box, pulling it from on top of a box full of old stuffed animals (to be donated to Goodwill) and onto the floor in front of him. It’s a heavy one. 

He opens the top flap, finding another box full of books (the last one being an entire box full of boating manuals). He takes a few out, examining the titles for anything interesting that could go on a shelf someday. 

_Oxford Dictionary of Law._

_Kaplan LSAT Preparation._

_Full Disclosure: The New Lawyer’s Must-Read Career Guide._

Dean drops the last book back into the box, closing it and kicking it away with his boot. A flush creeps up his neck, his legs crawling like he needed to get up and run. He remembers finding a list on a computer, an internet search history that had been neglected to be deleted–  something about night classes a City College that Sam would be able to get for cheap with his Stanford transcripts. 

_“Once things settle down, maybe,”_ Sam would scoff, swiping the laptop away before Dean could even get a good look at the college name. 

He stands up, boot scraping against the rough porch floor. 

“Just need some water,” he mutters, averting Cas’s stare, not wanting to see that damn pity in his eyes. Or confusion, as if he were to blame for Dean’s messed-up life. 

He traipses through the living room and kitchen, thanking God that the bathroom is functional and at least in decent shape. He splashes water on his face, lukewarm and metallic tasting. It drips down the back of his neck and into the collar of his shirt when he looks up to see his reflection in the spotted mirror. 

He barely recognizes the image, accepting that this husk is undoubtedly him now. Deep shadows under his eyes and his skin drawn and dry like a mask on his face. 

He grips the side of the sink, sighing as he hears Cas’s inevitable footsteps coming through the kitchen. He wears heavy boots like Dean now, having lost the old dress shoes and trench coat somewhere in the early summer when the heat started building. 

Cas appears in the doorway, leaning up against the over-painting moulding with one arm above his head. Dean opens his mouth, ready to tell him off, tell him to _go the fuck away he doesn’t need a shrink_ , when Cas cuts him off. 

“Would you like to go shopping?”

Cas has him in the car and pulling out of the gravel driveway in less than ten minutes, the rest of the boxes left abandoned on the porch. Dean knocked Cas’s hand away when he reached for the driver’s door, citing that he’s fucked up, not incapable. 

It’s a ten minute drive to Old Orchard Beach (“It’s overrun with tourists in the summer, but I think you will find it charming in the Fall,” Shirley said.). The road is nearly abandoned. They pass quaint restaurants and attractions sitting still with boards on the windows, prepared for the oncoming winter. A ferris wheel looms in the distant midway by the beach. 

Cas lists off things they need while they drive, only writing them down when Dean thrusts a pad of paper at him from the glovebox. Cas’s mind wanders however, distracted by the sights they pass. 

“I’ve never tried a funnel cake before,” he says as they pass a colorful but boarded-up food stand. A humanoid funnel cake smiles down at them like the worst kind of demon. 

Dean grimaces, the thought of delicious funnel cake somehow tainted. “You might have to wait for summer to get that, looks like.”

Cas responds with a “hmm,” looking back down at his list. 

Dean drives away from the beach, more inland to where locals spend their winters as well as the busy summers. He settles in his seat as the quaint vacation aesthetic settles more into a familiar hometown feel, complete with a greasy diner and a locally owned hardware store perched on a corner. He inches the Impala into a space right in front. 

“What’s on the list, Cas?” Dean asks, slapping a smile on his tired face. 

Cas holds out the list in response, tapping where his neat printing begins. 

  1. Paint for living room. 
  2. Kitchen Table
  3. dish soap
  4. wall wash
  5. Welcome mat



“Still on that damn welcome mat,” Dean says as they get out of the car. 

Cas smirks in reply, his eyes bright with mischief, and Dean can’t help but feel a little better when he sees it. 

The store is no bigger than their living room and kitchen put together, with shelving reaching up to the ceiling and forming cramped aisles. He leaves Cas at the paint counter, realizing belatedly that Cas is liable to pick out a can of neon yellow. He tries to care, finding the action pointless. 

He wanders slowly through the store, pushing a red cart with a wobbly wheel. He grabs the dish soap along with a tube of caulk for the windows. The small kitchen section proves to be all they need, and picks out a sturdy cast iron pan and a sheet pan to round out their cooking supplies. 

He’s on his way back to Cas when he spots the garden section, obviously a smaller version of what would be available in the summertime. He looks both ways before ducking into the aisle, surreptitiously searching for what would a suitable welcome mat. Some are made of natural fibers and some that claim to be water proof; there’s cats, flowers, pawprints, and rugs that bid a simple ‘Welcome!’ and sarcastic rugs that ask ‘What’s up?’ or “Keep Moving.” He walks right by the mat exclaiming “Bless our Home.”

He digs through a large pile labeled ‘clearance,’ and the right one jumps out at him after a minute. He smiles to himself, putting it in the rack under the cart and covering it with the sheet pan to surprise Cas. 

He finds Cas still standing at the paint samples, now with two gallons sitting ready to go at the counter. He talks amicably with the cashier, small talk about the weather and tides that Dean had never known to interest Cas. His voice is low and pleasant, and Dean realizes with a jolt that Cas makes a pretty good human. Good enough to not annoy you even when you have to mix paint for him at $7.75 an hour. 

He sidles up to the counter, keeping the cart a safe distance behind him. Cas smiles, and Dean swallows back a lump in his throat. 

“What’d you get?” Dean asks, glancing down at the paint. 

Cas hands him the color sample, pointing to a particular shade of grey. 

It’s not what he expected Cas to pick: a muted, dusty color that looks more grey than purple, but still interesting enough to look at. 

“It reminds me of how the ocean looks outside of the house,” Cas says, nerves at the edge of his voice. 

Dean nods, handing the sample back to the cashier. “Looks great.”

The cashier selects a few brushes for them and bags up the rest of their items, and Dean chats him up about other business in the area, getting information on a discount furniture store and a grocery store. He sends Cas out to bring the car around so that can secretly bag up the welcome mat, feeling excited and foolish all at once. 

He carries three bags out to the car, tossing them into the trunk before ceding and climbing into the passenger seat, Cas eyes him with a skeptical raise of his eyebrow. 

“Just drive,” Dean says, gesturing to the road in front of them. 

Cas shrugs, heading towards the grocery store at the other end of the block. 

Dean feels the pain in his wallet as he checks over their hardware store receipt in the grocery store parking lot, thinking that he might have to drive a few miles and hustle pool somewhere, when he remembers a credit card Charlie had given him ‘for emergencies.’ It’s still shiny and in its slipcover in his wallet, and he thinks that impending domesticity is as good an emergency as anything. 

Nevertheless, Dean still picks up a sale paper while Cas pushes the cart through the produce section. He watches Dean pick up a jumbo bag of apples (they aren’t so bad, for a fruit) and some milk, eggs, and butter from the small adjacent dairy section. Cas selects a few yogurts, going for the kind that are marked ten for ten. 

They round out their purchases with some cooking basics like oil and some seasonings, along with a bag of frozen french fries and a package of ground beef with hamburger buns for dinner that night. The cashier dazzles Cas by offering to sign him up for a store discount card, and Dean has him fill out the form so that it’s in his name. 

Cas pauses at the top of the form, his pen stalling before neatly penning _Castiel Winchester_ and then Dean finds it hard to look him in the eye, so he busies himself with helping the cashier bag up their groceries. 

Their little house looks even drabber than they left it when they get back, but Dean gets busy warming it up with the smell of cooking hamburger. He enjoys the pop and sizzle of the meat in his new cast iron pan, and heartily agrees when Cas suggests sitting on the porch to eat. They didn’t make it to the furniture store for a kitchen table, but Dean just thinks _one step at a time_ before joining Cas on the porch. 

Cas inhales his burger, only pausing to periodically wipe grease from his mouth, and for once the sight of Cas eating doesn’t fill Dean with anxiety. He savors his burger, wondering at how bread and meat and cheese could be so comforting, when he remembers the oversize paper bag leaning against the side of the porch. 

He sets his plate down, wandering over to retrieve it; he left it there after coming home from the store, waiting for a better moment to surprise Cas. Shuffling back over to Cas, he can feel his ears burning. Cas looks up, eyes flicking down to peer at the package. 

“I grabbed this for you today,” Dean says. “Thought you might like it.”

He thrusts the bag at Cas, who takes it with a furrowed brow.

Dean’s stomach turns as Cas pulls the mat out of the paper bag, holding it in his lap to inspect it. It’s the kind with rough bristles, good for actually wiping your feet, with a muted design on the front: a few yellow and black Honey Bees flying around the words _Buzz on in!_

Cas smiles wider the longer he looks at it, running his fingers over the bristles.

“You know, I just remembered when you used to like bees a lot–” Dean stutters, the words sounding more than stupid coming from his mouth, “I mean I know it wasn’t the greatest time but–  well I figured you might still like them. If it’s stupid we can take it back–”

His rambling gets cut off when Cas silences him with an honest-to-God hug, arms curling around his neck. He presses his face into Dean’s shoulder and Dean tenses up, his hands hanging in the air. Cas sighs into his shoulder and Dean relaxes, placing his hands on Cas’s back and holding him close. It’s different than a quick hug shared between friends, but Dean tries to keep his mind somewhat calm. The wood of the porch groans underneath them, and the ocean crashes in the distance, unending and unstoppable.

 

* * *

 

Cas cracks open the first Harry Potter book that night, reading aloud to Dean. It’s not entirely unpleasant, he has to admit. 

“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense…”

Dean smirks to himself at the image, remember a little bit of the first Harry Potter movie Sam had caught on ABC Family once. Cas’s voice is low and reassuring, and he finds himself drifting, absentmindedly scratching out a new to-do list on the back of a clean napkin left over from dinner. 

  1. Chop more wood.
  2. Get Cas a library card.
  3. Furniture other than air mattresses.
  4. Research phone glitches.
  5. Clean kitchen wall.



Cas falls asleep a while after that, resting the book on the pillow next to his head. Dean checks his phone, seeing that it’s almost midnight. Energy courses through him, however, and he gets up and makes his way to the kitchen, flipping the lamp off to leave Cas in peace.  

He goes to the fridge, staring at the brightly lit interior before settling on the carton of milk, pouring himself a tall glass and gulping it down. Mary Winchester was fond of milk as a cure for restlessness; Dean uses whiskey more often than not. It strikes him that he hasn't even thought to stock the house with alcohol, other than a few beers that were in a cooler in the Impala when they bought the house. He shivers, thinking back to the binge he went on when it really sunk in that his brother is dead. 

He swallows hard, sitting down in the folding chair and staring at the wall as if sheer will can make it clean. Maybe it was a lost cause anyway; maybe when they go to strip it of the char and burnt spots it will simply crumble, leaving them with an even bigger problem. Maybe painting over it would be better. 

He sniffs the air, and with the scent of burnt drywall he knows it’s not an option. 

The house settles in the night, creaking and groaning from the constant wind blowing off of the surf. They didn’t really do their research, he realizes; probably should’ve sprung for an inspection. The house could have structural problems, it could be infested with termite damage or black mold or a whole host of issues. Or maybe the owners were just unsettled to come home to a fire that didn’t seem to have any origin.

Cas found the money, stuffed inside the Impala’s glove box like an afterthought. What was money to a Knight of Hell? Crowley had enjoyed renting him out to human bottom-dwellers: mob bosses, violent drug ring leaders, the works. The best hitman in history. Just don’t get on his bad side. 

It was easy getting rid of it; spending it on something that could make Cas happy, maybe even do the same for Dean someday. He stares at the wall, feeling as if heat still radiates from it. As if Cas is still standing tall,wrapped in a trench coat, and the leftover grace of some poor bastard angel–  calling out for him to close his eyes– 

_Tap, tap, tap._

He sits up, the noise new in the never ending roar of the ocean and the standard creaks of the old house. 

_Tap, tap, tap._

“What the fuck–” he whispers, standing up to investigate the living room for the source of the sound. He wanders over to the window near the woodstove, checking for a bat or some other creepy-crawler, but there’s nothing. Nothing outside the window either besides grass swaying in darkness. 

The sounds happens again, this time more of a scratching like a fingernail, now coming from the door. Cas sleeps soundly by his feet, arm thrown over his face, and Dean tiptoes to the duffel they have stored in the closet, pulling out his handgun and checking to see that it’s loaded.  

He gives the devils trap by the door a once over, finding it without cracks. His heart still beats in his throat, and he positions his gun at his side, not trusting his finger to not be too jumpy. He puts one hand on the doorknob, turning it slowly and carefully, opening the door only a crack. 

He cries out when something small and black shoots through the crack in the door and by his feet into the living room. He turns on his heel to follow it, hitting his bare toe against the base of the moulding. 

“Fuck!”

Cas groans, sitting up in the corner of his eye. He yawns, running a hand through messy hair. 

“Dean? What’re you doing with a gun?” he asks. 

“Jesus fuck–” he says, swallowing back the pain in his right foot, “There’s a fucking–  there’s an animal in here somewhere.”

“An animal?” Cas asks, like he’s never even heard the word. 

“Yes!” He points wildly, “It went into the kitchen.”

“Was it big?”

“Cas!”

Cas laughs, holding up his hands and standing up. He hobbles toward the kitchen, limbs obviously still asleep. 

Dean waits for a yell, or at least for Cas to call him. What he doesn’t expect is for Cas to come back into the living room with a fully grown black cat in his arms, scratching under its neck and looking for all the world like he had just made a new friend. 

“She seems hungry,” is all he says, before disappearing back into the kitchen. 

Dean sighs, unloaded his gun and tossing it back into the bag, following Cas into the kitchen.

“It might already have a home, Cas,” Dean says, trying to keep his voice gentle. 

“She might,” Cas mutters, rummaging through the fridge as the cat sits at his feet, tail wagging like a dog. “I don’t intend on keeping her prisoner if she wishes to leave. I’m just showing hospitality.”

Dean sighs, nodding. Turns out the cat doesn’t mind eating cold hamburger chopped up on a plate, if its ribs sticking out from its side are anything to go by. While it eats, Cas fixes up a bundle of blankets from the trunk of the Impala into some sort of bed that the cat promptly ignores, preferring instead to settle on Dean’s air mattress, put its head down, and fall asleep. 

This means that by the time morning filters in through their dirty windows Dean is leaking snot and his eyes itch something unholy. He sneezes over the cereal Cas brings him, who doesn’t seem to notice for all the goo-goo eyes he’s making at the damn cat. 

“She looks to be about a year old,” he says, scratching the cat behind its ears when it gets up to stretch. “A cat would keep the mice away.”

Dean doesn’t say that he doesn’t remember seeing any mice, instead he sniffs and adds cat food, a litter box, and allergy medication to the list he had made the night before. 

At least cats are pretty self-sufficient, Dean thinks, as she settles down in a warm patch of sun to groom. She supervises while they start to clear out the living room, deflating the air mattresses and sticking them in the kitchen to be re-made later. Dean averts his eyes from the soot-covered wall, deciding that it would be best after the staring contest he had with it the night before. 

They agreed to paint the living room today, but after looking at the dusty mouldings and marked-up walls, it becomes obvious that they need to wash the walls first. Dean lays down a tarp they probably used to wrap up dead monsters more than once. He mixes up some water and wall wash in an old salt bucket, using old rags to wash dust and grime from the walls to reveal the original putrid green color. The whole job kills a little over an hour once they get to all the cracks and grooves. 

“We should be able to paint tomorrow,” Dean says after they stand up, finished. His neck aches but it’s good. Like they had accomplished something, rather than just pushing junk around. 

Cas steps out after that to go pick up cat supplies and a few odds and ends (who knew a house needed so many _things_?); suddenly Dean is left in the drafty old house for the first time, with no one but the cat for company. She stares at him as he paces around, and he dutifully ignores her, instead going for the tube of caulk, applying it over cracks in the walls and window frames and smoothing it over with a finger. It seals up the shrunken wood, hopefully enough to keep out the cold come wintertime. 

_You could have picked somewhere warmer._

He almost drops the knife at the memory, the voice faded and muffled but _there_ as if Sam were right behind him, and he drops the knife. He fumbles, catching it on the blade side and smearing white caulk all over his hands. 

“Fuck.”

He stalks into the kitchen, holds his hand under the tap and scrubs it with dish soap. The cat jumps onto the counter after a few moments, having followed him from the living room it would seem. She stares again, letting out a loud _mrrrow_ when he doesn’t look at her. 

He huffs a laugh. “You making fun of me?” he asks, feeling ridiculous but finding it hard to care. “I guess I deserve it.”

She watches him dry his hands, walk with delicate cat steps toward him. 

He shrugs. “Cas is going to get you food. I’ve got nothing.”

She doesn’t seem to care, instead nudging her wet nose against his hand braced on the counter, as if she were trying to get underneath it. He grimaces, lifting it experimentally as she follows it with her eyes, before lowering it to rest on her head. He gives her a few pets, and she starts to purr softly. 

“Would you look at that,” he says, moving to scratch her neck. She lifts her head to oblige him, and he tries his best not to sneeze. 

After a while he wanders outside, the cat following at his heels as he drifts down the uneven path to the beach. At early afternoon it’s already high tide again, and he sits far back to avoid the spray. The cat seems right at home amongst the sand, settling down in it to bathe. 

Dean breathes deep, the air catching and hitching in his chest. He can always blame it on the cat, if need be. 

 


	4. Chapter 4

Before Dean can fully process how, they’ve already spent a week in the new house. They paint the living room, covering the green with Cas’s top-notch shade of gray and adding a new coat of white to the mouldings and window frame. They buy a lamp and an end table to put it on for the living room, only glancing at the kitchen tables in the store before Dean makes an excuse to leave. 

He meets up with a notary in town to finalize the closing on the house, and by Saturday they are legally homeowners in the State of Maine. 

The cat sticks around, going in and out but always returning. Dean attributes it to the expensive food Cas insists on buying for her, and possibly to the companionship. 

“You gonna give her a name?” Dean asks one afternoon. 

Cas pauses, wheels turning. 

“I was thinking of calling her Ruth,” he says after a moment. 

“Got a thing for old lady names?”

Cas chuckles. “No. She’s the protagonist of one of my favorite Old Testament stories.”

“Huh.” Dean shrugs. “Seems like as good a name as any.”

The kitchen still lacks a floor, and by week three Dean is sick of having to put his boots on to get a glass of water. This realization comes along with a knock on the door. 

It nearly makes Dean jump out of his skin, but Cas just shrugs and continues reading while lying on the air mattress. 

“I guess I’ll get it,” Dean mumbles, getting up to go to the door, tugging a tarp over the devils trap. 

He opens the door to see a tall, stocky woman on their front porch with her hands in her jean pockets. Her skin is a deep brown and she has short red hair and a smattering of freckles across her nose. 

She immediately holds out a hand, her mouth breaking into a wide smile with a lot of teeth.

“Hey, neighbor!”

Dean takes the offered hand, suddenly feeling his lack of practice with social skills. Sometimes he and Cas sit in silence for hours. 

She doesn’t seem fazed. “I’m Mara. Davis.My house is just a mile up the road,” she makes a vague gesture towards the street, “So glad to finally meet you, I hadn’t realized someone moved in until I spotted your garbage on the curb.”

She looks expectantly at him, and he remembers his voice. “Sorry, yeah, we didn’t even know many people lived over this way…” Cas appears behind him like a shadow.

“Not without the efforts of all the locals I’m afraid. Yuppies from down south have been trying to get this land for years–wanna turn it into the new Kennebunkport.” Her eyes flick back and forth between them. “And your names are?”

“Oh, sorry,” Dean says again, wondering where he had left his suave ways, “I’m Dean, and this is Cas. You want to come in?”

“Sure, thanks.”

Dean steps aside and she crosses the threshold, looking around the living room with another smile. 

“Already looks better in here. The last tenants ran it into the ground.”

Dean’s eyes flick to cas, who’s already watching him. 

“Tenants?” he asks.

“Yep, the old owners would rent the place out. Seasonal, like everything else up here. Last tenants caused the fire, though they denied it up and down the wall.”

There’s an awkward silence as Dean tries to quiet the alarms going off in his head and Cas tries to do the same using the power of eye contact or telepathy or _something_ , and Mara scuffs her feet against the floor. 

She breaks the silence. “Well, I can’t say this is only a social call. I saw you working on your car outside there, and was wondering if you would be interested in some work?”

Dean shrugs, shocked at the offer. “Well sure–but you’d trust a complete stranger with your car?”

Mara shrugs. “I figure is you can handle that vehicle, you can handle pretty much anything. And if you botch it up I’ll know you’re not an honest man. That would be on you.”

Dean clears his throat, unsure how to respond. 

“That’s a good point,” Cas points out, the first words spoken since Mara’s arrival, and Dean stifles the urge to punch him in the gut.

“I mean, I was gonna offer you cash,” she continues, ignoring their discomfort, “But I’m seeing that your kitchen floor is in need of… well, a floor and I’m a contractor around here. I could help you, like a trade.”

Dean glances at the rough cement and jagged edges left behind by the broken tiles, seriously tempted by the offer. He looks at Cas, who shrugs. 

He looks back at Mara waiting for his response. 

“I think we can make some kind of deal.”

They do, and the following day Mara tows her car to their house, parking it in the gravel a good ten feet from the Impala. It turns out that Mara has tile leftover from her last job that she doesn’t mind throwing in for the project, insisting that “It was only rattling around in the back of my trunk anyway.” Cas stares wide eyed at the blue tiles when she hauls them inside, lost in the marbled swirl of color. 

While she works her magic, Dean works on her car in the cool autumn air, replacing the spark plugs that long since gone to shit. An easy job on most cars, her spark plugs are hidden deep inwards and require jostling to find. The motor oil does feel good on his hands, along with the ache in his shoulders from craning his neck.

All around it takes him about three hours to finish the job, and Mara comes outside right as he closes the hood. 

“All good?” she asks.

“Yup. Let me know if it gives you any more trouble.”

Mara smiles. “Will do. Your floor is done too. Your friend won’t stop staring at it.”

Dean rolls his eyes, following Mara back to the house to see for himself. Sure enough, Cas stands at the seam where the living room carpet gives way to the kitchen tile, as if examining it for every detail. 

“Like what you see?” he asks

Cas nods. “Yes. It brings it all together.”

Dean can’t help but agree, even if the tile is still covered in dust. Mara explains that they can’t walk on it until tomorrow or risk compromising the settling. Dean eyes where the charred wall already sticks out like a sore thumb next to the brand new tile. 

Mara follows his sightline as Cas moves past her to step outside. “Ah, yeah, that’s why I was so surprised you guys bought the place. You gonna clean it or paint over it?”

She’s only making small talk, her voice as sunny as ever, but Dean hears it as if through a steel door. The wall swims before his eyes, charred and black, with just the barest outline of a spraypainted sigil underneath the soot. 

“You ok?”

He snaps out of it to see Mara staring at him, concern worrying her face.

“Yeah,” he says too quickly, shaking his head and scuffing his boot against the ground, “We should try your car.”

The engine turns over beautifully and without the incessant clicking of bad spark-plugs. Mara seems pleased as she drives away, after thanking him enough to make his ears burn red. 

He turns back toward the house, apprehension building in his stomach at the thought of looking at the wall again. At least he won’t be able to go in the kitchen tonight. 

Upon walking through the door he finds Cas back at his spot, looking down at the new floor, his back to Dean. The knot in his stomach loosens, and Dean can feel a memory forming, strangely enough. He takes stock of Cas’s hands resting on his hips, the way Dean’s old clothes hang on his waist, stretching tighter over his wider hips. 

Cas turns around, smiling. 

“We’ll have to pick another paint color,” he says, gesturing to the floor.

Dean clears his throat, tapping a hand against his thigh. “Yeah. Yeah we will.”

Without a kitchen to use, they drive into town that night to get something to eat, settling on the typical looking Greek diner next to an old movie theater. The waitstaff is welcoming and familiar with their regulars, and Dean remembers how good burgers could taste cooked on a flat-top. Cas orders a souvlaki sandwich, to Dean’s surprise.

“What?” he asks when he sees Dean’s raised eyebrows, “It wouldn’t hurt you to branch out, Dean.”

Dean holds his hands up in surrender, and laughs at Cas later when he has to lick yogurt sauce off of his forearm. He’s amused, and feeling something else, admittedly. 

The air has a genuine nip to it now, and they bring a few stacks of wood into the entryway to keep the stove going through the night. Ruth settles at the foot of Cas’s bed (she goes back and forth usually), and Dean feels a decent night of sleep coming on. 

It’s all shot to hell he wakes up a few hours later to the sound of gently whistling air. At first, he thinks he’s outside with the wind seeping through the cracked windows of the Impala, or on a boat rocking to the current. 

He only fully wakes when his back hits the floor, his air mattress floppy and deflated around him. He flails out, imbalanced, catching his foot on the end table and knocking it and the lamp onto the floor with a crash. 

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters as Cas’s head pops up in the darkness. 

“W’as wrong?” he asks, rubbing his head. 

“Nothing,” Dean lies, trying to stand up and nearly losing his balance on the rapidly deflating mattress. Something shines bright in the dark: the reflection of a large eye.

“Your cat put a fucking hole in the mattress,” Dean snaps, watching Ruth’s smug outline bathe in the darkness as if she had done nothing wrong, “Don’t act all innocent!” he yells in her direction.

“Dean,” Cas says, cautiously even though his voice already shakes with laughter, “Ruth is intelligent, but I doubt she can talk back. At least not yet.”

Dean growls in frustration, looking back down at the now completely deflated mattress. He bites his bottom lip, the pain hardening his resolve before bending down and swiping his pillow.

Cas is already talking. “Just come and sleep here–”

Dean rolls his eyes because isn’t that just his fucking luck. As if Cas isn’t touchy-feely enough these days, with his comforting hands and quiet disposition and tendency to make Dean feel safe. 

It’s exhausting. 

Cas’s face is open, if not gently annoyed at Dean’s hesitation. 

Dean shrugs. “Yeah yeah, just move over, I need my space.”

Cas scoots over to lie on the right side of the mattress, and Dean moves to settle on the left. He stumbles on the way down, overshooting a bit and almost pitching Cas off the side. Cas rights himself in a moment, the picture of grace, and Dean stifles a laugh. Cas sends him a particularly grumpy look. 

They get comfortable after a few more minutes of jostling and swearing (mostly on Dean’s half, but Cas does drop a few f-bombs these days). Dean manages to find a position where he doesn’t feel like Rose balancing on the door fragment after the sinking of the Titanic, even if his lower back is already crying out in pain. 

“Goodnight, Dean.”

“Night, Cas.”

Dean tries chasing sleep again, finding it pointless since his legs already feel jumpy under the blanket. He starts to count Cas’s steady breaths, wondering if he could be asleep already. 

When Dean opens his eyes, he sees Cas staring at the ceiling. 

“Cas?”

He doesn’t answer right away, and Dean sees him swallow, his throat working in the moonlight. 

“Yeah?”

“How much do you, you know, sleep these days?” Dean asks. 

The answering silence feels like a hundred pound weight sitting between them, and Dean feels like he overstepped big time. He tries to avoid the subject, usually, only bringing up Cas’s stolen and fading grace if it’s to keep him from using it. He forgets that Cas isn’t all human; that he’s trapped in a slow and painful decay.

“On and off,” he starts, “Sometimes the whole night, sometimes I doze, sometimes I can’t even remember what sleep feels like.”

“Oh,” Dean says, feeling like even that felt like too much information. He turns over, fulling intending to let the subject drop. 

“How much do you sleep, Dean?”

Dean laughs softly, knowing he deserves it.

“Enough.”

“How much is enough?”

“Four, five hours.”

“Seven to nine hours is optimal for good bodily and mental functions.”

Dean laughs again, a darker sound than before. “What are you, a doctor?”

“I don’t want you to have nightmares, Dean,” Cas says, an edge of annoyance to his voice, “That doesn’t require a medical license.”

Dean sighs, his responses catching in his throat. 

“I’m sorry,” Cas says, breaking the silence, “I keep snapping at you, I don’t mean to do it.”

Dean turns over, facing away and suddenly tired again. 

“You act like all this only affects me, Cas. You’re allowed to be upset.”

A beat passes. The waves crash outside, a lonely sound. 

“Why don’t you want to clean the wall?” Cas asks.

Dean bites the inside of his cheek, feeling the skin give way and a trickle of blood flow out. 

“Of course I want to clean the damn wall, Cas.”

“It doesn’t seem like it.”

Dean rubs his wrists, feeling like they’re still bound to the chair, still fighting through the bonds. 

“We’re going to have to use shitty chemicals and I haven’t gotten a chance to get masks and goggles,” Dean says, trying to keep his voice calm and even. 

Cas sighs, an ugly sound. “You know what I’m trying to say, Dean.”

Dean feels flames lick up his forearm and burn into his chest. He sits up, clenching his fists. 

“Then fucking say it, Cas.”

He gets up before Cas can talk, however, already pulling on a pair of jeans and searching for his keys. Anger, familiar and alien all at once, races through him red-hot and he doesn’t want to hear Cas say something that could set him over the edge.  

He’s almost to the door when Cas speaks, his voice low and sad and void of the righteousness from before. 

“Your brother wouldn’t have wanted this for you, and you know it.”

Dean stops, hand on the doorknob. He tongues at the jagged skin in his mouth, the metallic taste coating his tongue. It’s the same, sad voice that had entered his final demonic consciousness, and hearing it makes him feel like he could explode. 

He doesn’t slam the door on the way out, even if every instinct wants him to. 

The night is still and cool while he makes his way to the Impala, shoving his arms through the sleeves of his jacket. His mind is reeling, fuzzy from fighting while exhausted. He needs a drive, and the roar of the engine momentarily clears his head. 

He takes the highway into the mostly dark town, driving past the beach-front amusement park and circling back through the downtown. The windows are dark only like a beach town in November can be. 

He doesn’t know where he’s going until he pulls into the 24-hour convenience store, sighing and turning the car off in the mostly empty parking lot. He nods to the cashier as he walks through the automatic doors, the bright fluorescent lights making his eyes sting. He walks up and down the aisles, grabbing for two pairs of rubber gloves and face masks in the medicine section. He snags hard plastic goggles from the small hardware aisle. 

He throws in a carton of ice cream and a pack of gum so he doesn't look like too much of a serial killer, but the cashier, a middle-aged woman with hair pulled fiercely back from her face, still looks at him like he has three heads. 

“Do you have a rewards card?” she asks after ringing up the last item. 

“No,” he says, readying himself to turn down the offer. 

“Would you like to open one? It’s free.”

Dean starts to say no, he travels a lot and doesn’t live near a location. He realizes that it wouldn’t just be a way to divert attention, it would be a lie. 

He _does_ live here.

“Sure, why not?” he says instead, and she slaps the paperwork down on the counter in front of him. 

It only takes a minute to fill out, and Dean feels a strange sense of accomplishment when he sees that he’s already gained ten points and that he had been granted a sale price on the ice cream. 

He feels lighter when he goes back to the car. The early morning sun filters in through the Impala’s dirty windows (he should get on that) as he drives back to the house. When he pulls up the gravel driveway, Cas waits on the porch. 

He holds up his bag of cleaning supplies, shrugging. 

“Will you help me?”

Of course he helps; Dean knows the only thing stronger than Cas’s stubborn will is his desire to help, to make himself useful. They put on long sleeved shirts, goofy looking goggles, and rubber gloves to protect against the harsh cleaner, the skull and crossbones on the bottle promising serious consequences if they don’t.

They’re almost ready to go when, wordlessly, Cas takes hold of his shoulders and turns him around, placing a mask over his mouth and nose and tying it behind his head. Dean’s hands shake as he does the same for him, the papery cotton whispering against the dry skin of their hands in the silence. He can’t see Cas’s mouth when he turns back around, but he would bet all the money he had that he’s wearing a small, sad smile. 

The cleaner sprays in a foam stream, thickening as it hits the wall to absorb as much of the char and smoke damage as possible. They wait the prescribed fifteen minutes before starting to scrub with the long-handled brushes, working the foam into the wash and scrubbing away the blackened paint with every stroke. 

* * *

 

_“Sammy…”_

_Castiel can feel Sam’s pain, the way he intermittently grips the syringe hard and then loosens his fist, staring at his brother’s face as if it were the second coming of Christ gone horribly, horribly wrong. He rolls his shoulders back and forth, as if getting ready to fight instead of facing his very tied up brother._

_“Sammy… you’re wasting your time,” Dean says, his voice a foreign drawl._

_“No,” Sam says, looking at his watch, checking how long it’s been, “This is going to work, Dean, you’ll see.”_

_Dean throws his head back, his laugh nothing like it had ever been, dark and hollow and without any trace of humor. Castiel presses his back harder against the wall, wanting to be far away from him, as far as he could possibly be without leaving him._

_They had followed his trail of blood all the way to Maine, to a bustling tourist beach town with an active crossroads business. Why send just hellhounds when you can send your own personal Knight of Hell to terrorize your high-income clients? The point had been moot. Castiel had managed to knock Dean out with an old Enochian sigil, transporting him to an abandoned beach house to finish the job. Cas tries to concentrate on the garish salmon-colored walls and slightly warped kitchen table, looking as if its occupants had left behind boxes of junk to be forted through, but his eyes continue to wander back to the scene in front of him._

_Sam’s coughs, and Castiel can see the mist of blood fly from his mouth; Two trials down to close the gates of hell for good, he is rounding the third, and using his own brother to finish the job. His body rots from the inside out, far beyond Castiel’s help._

_They had discussed it. It’s settled. That doesn’t mean Castiel has to like it, though._

_Every once in awhile, Dean turns his black eyes on him instead of Sam, lips curling over his teeth._

_“Crowley told me to kill you,” he says, his smile a leer that sends chills down Castiel’s spine, “I told him it would be a_ pleasure _, as long as I got to fuck you first.”_

_Castiel swallows the lump in his throat, digging his hands further down in his pockets._

_“You’d like that wouldn’t you?”_

_“Ok, that’s enough.” Sam moves then, plunging the fresh syringe full of blood into Dean’s neck and pressing down on the plunger._

_Dean yells, snarling and spitting, but it grows weaker every time, and his head drops to his chest when Sam finishes. His shoulders twitch with some approximation of a sob._

_“How much longer will this take?” Cas asks after a few moments of silence._

_“Not much longer now. We’ll give it a rest for a minute”_

_Sam sits down for a moment, almost falling backward into the straight-backed kitchen chair,blood trickling from his ears and nose._

_“Sam.”_

_“Not really a good time to try to talk me out of this, Cas.”_

_Cas sighs, staring at Dean slumped over. He finally seems to have fallen unconscious, for the time being._

_“I know,” he says, even if Sam’s question had long ago disappeared in the humid summer air. “He’ll never forgive me, though.”_

_Sam laughs, a dark sound that’s closer to a cough. “I had the first two trials under my belt before you even knew about it. I made sure that it worked out that way.”_

_“So you think he’ll blame you?”_

_Sam looks at Dean, swallowing hard. “Dean will do whatever makes it hurt more. But he’ll realize that I was right, in the end.”_

_“Will he?” Cas asks, pushing off from the wall and approaching the devils trap. “That doesn’t sound like the Dean I know.”_

_“I know.” Sam shakes his head. “It’s a moot point anyway. You might be able to fix me, right?”_

_“Sam–I said it was a possibility, not–”_

_Dean starts to stir, yanking at his bonds and lifting his head. His eyes are normal now, green against freckled skin. They’re impossibly soft._

_“Hey guys,” he says, his voice hoarse, “Sammy...”_

_Sam approaches carefully, eyes guarded._

_Dean coughs, blood leaking from the corner of his mouth.“I’ll tell you what, Sammy,” more coughing, followed by Dean shaking as if his whole body had fallen cold, “This works, we’re taking a break.”_

_Sam stops. “What, like a vacation?”_

_Dean nods, smiling as his head hangs. “When was the last time either one of us was on a beach?”_

_Sam bites his lip. “Never. Unless you count yesterday.”_

_“I bet you’d rather not.” Dean sits back, his eyes tired now. “You mind helping me out guys?”_

_Sam nods and catches Cas’s eye. There isn’t anything else to say. Sam picks up the last syringe, already full of his purified blood. He holds it between his thumb and forefinger, fear clouding his eyes._

_“Ok,” he says, breathless, looking back and at Cas and to Dean’s shining eyes. “Ok.”_

_Cas wants to tear his hair out, scream, knock the syringe out of Sam’s hand–anything but just sit by with his hands in his pockets as Dean lets his head fall to the side, the needle entering his skin without resistance. Sam fumbles for a knife, slitting his palm and covering Dean’s mouth in an instant._

_"Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus. Hanc animam redintegra, lustra. Lustra.”_

_There’s a tremor, like the beginning of an earthquake. Blinding, heavenly light fills the room, but Castiel is still an angel. He sees through it; he sees when Sam begins to fall and catches him before his head hits the ground._

 

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

Sam did it quickly, this time around. First you kill a hellhound, then you save an innocent soul from hell, then you cure a demon. Dean hadn’t even expected it when he had been suddenly back in his brother’s clutches, tied to a chair under a devils trap and snarling something fierce. He hadn’t expected it when he started the obvious demon-curing ritual. Of course his brother would try to cure him, that had been expected. 

Sam closing the gates of Hell and leaving him here, freshly human again and without a purpose, that had been a shock. 

Of course there had been Cas, picking him up and bringing him to the bathroom and washing the blood from his neck and mouth. Dean would never forget the first few words that had been uttered to him, the Mark fresh off his wrist and reality crashing down on him. 

_Sam is gone._

_I’m so, so sorry, Dean._

_You’re going to be ok, Dean._

_I’m here._

And that had been that. They took care of Sam’s body, Dean in a kind of fog that surpassed the best drugs he had ever taken. Cas had described it as a side effect of changing from a Knight of Hell back into a human. 

At least minimal neighbors had made setting up a pyre relatively easy. 

The world didn’t look much different with the doors of Hell shut tight. Crowley had been killed by his own supporters and most demons ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, unable to go home and losing power by the day. They ganked a few while they were on the road, and Dean had to admit that once whatever kept him stoned wore off it felt good to get some anger out. Maybe there was only so much they could cure of the Mark of Cain. 

When they finally made it back to Kansas, Dean had immediately wanted to leave. The bunker sat filled with ghosts that hadn’t been there before, and not the kind you could shoot with a salt round. It was a prison filled with Sam’s books still sitting open or with makeshift bookmarks hanging out the side and his laundry still piled up in the corner of his room; the slow, gradual signs that Sam had been finding a home there. 

Going back out on the road had been Cas’s idea, Dean not good for much creative thinking at that moment, and he had steered Dean around the eastern seaboard like a zombie. They looked for cases and slept in motels that reminded him more of his brother than the bunker, to say the truth. He did his best though, since Cas was giving all he had, but at the end of the day, he was tired. 

Heading back to Maine hadn’t been Dean’s idea either, sprung from a rare moment when Cas drove to let Dean sleep in the passenger seat, face comically smashed against the window. He only remembers it because he was greeted to the first sight of Old Orchard Beach through the fog he had created on the window. 

It hadn’t been his idea to go back to Maine, but it had been his idea to to stay. Cas found the realtor without much trouble. It had been easy following her car in the Impala to a small beach house that she called “dirt cheap.” Finding out that it was the house where his brother died, not so much. 

 

* * *

 

The kitchen starts to shape up once the walls are free of char. Cas picks out a yellow he calls “pale butter” to paint it and Dean admits relief when the salmon pink is completely gone. Out of all the home improvement chores, Cas seems to enjoy painting the most, humming and singing along with the music Dean streams from his phone. 

They start accumulating _stuff_. Dean doesn’t have much reference for what a house is supposed to look like, but he models their inventory after Lisa’s once perfectly organized cabinets from days gone by, albeit a little less organized. Cleaners and sponges go under the sink; plates and bowls in the cabinet to the right of the stove, cups to the left. Mara comes by again, this time with a futon in the back of her truck, asking if they can use it. Cas puts it next to the end table in the living room, and suddenly they have a real place to sit.

Soon it’s the first Tuesday in November, and after a low-key Halloween, they’ve already been in the house for a solid month. Warm days and cool night switch over to honest-to-God cold 24-7, and Cas talks about getting more living room furniture and moving the air mattress into the bedroom they still haven’t tackled yet.

“We should probably get a real bed soon, anyway,” Cas says.

Dean nods and agrees at the time, but only goes as far as to pick up a few flannel blankets from the secondhand store to pile on top of their air mattress. It’s easier that trying to to explain to Cas that two fully grown men should probably get their own beds, even if the rhythm of Cas’s breathing keeps the nightmares at bay. 

One particular afternoon, they sit on the steps of the front porch, sipping piss-warm beers and watching the waves roll in and out. Dean wraps his coat tighter around himself, warding off the chill. Cas twirls a piece of string around for Ruth to play with in the grass below the stoop.

Cas inhales, the breath wheezing slightly in his chest. 

Dean looks at him. “Your coat warm enough, Cas?”

“Of course,” Cas says as Ruth leaps after the string. 

Dean nods. “Just asking. It’s only gonna get colder, you know.”

“I’m aware.” Cas lets the string fall still, Ruth rolling the dirt, momentarily distracted. He stares out over the water. “The winters will be hard, but what will the summers be like?”

Dean raises his eyebrows. “You asking me to tell you about summers in Maine? I know about as much as you do. Probably less, considering the whole angel thing.”

Cas shrugs, smirking. “I guess I’d just like to hear it from you.”

For some reason, that makes the area behind Dean’s ears grow warm, and he stumbles through his next few words. “Well–I don’t know, man–it’s not like we’re in the Bahamas, you know?”

“I do.”

Dean laughs. “So it’s never gonna be the tropics, but I’m hoping it’ll get pretty warm. We can find out what grows well around here and plant a garden.”

Cas leans back on his elbows. “What would we plant?”

Dean tips his head back to think. “I’d like to grow food, since it’s something useful. But it might be nice to have some flowers too, make the house look nice, you know?"

“I’d like that too.”

Dean keeps going, feeling like he’s on a roll. “And it might even get warm enough to swim. Never really done it before.”

“Swimming?” Cas asks, meeting his eyes. 

“I mean, I’ve swam, but only to get away from monsters or to save someone.”

“Huh.” Cas sits up. “You’ll have to teach me how.”

Dean barks a laugh. “Angel of the Lord–you can’t swim?”

“I’ve never had occasion.”

The image of Cas, skin tanned golden by the sun and hair ruffled by the ocean breeze, assaults Dean’s mind and sits plastered behind his eyes until his neck burns along with his ears. He opens his mouth, a shaky retort ready on his tongue, when his phone buzzes in his pocket, surprising him. 

These days, missed calls from Jody number in the low hundreds, but he keeps her at bay by shooting her a text saying they were ok and would find a permanent place to stay soon. Telling Jody where they are means _seeing_ Jody, all half-smiles and reminding Dean of the relationship she might have had with Sam if their lives didn’t suck. 

It isn’t Jody’s name that flashes across the screen now, but the same warning of _Unknown Caller_ he had gotten a few weeks ago. He swipes to answer, clenching his jaw. 

“Hello?”

He holds his breath, waiting for a voice–any voice really. A telemarketer or solicitation or even an old hunting buddy, but he only gets static. 

“Who is this?” he insists.

More static breaks up in the line, but he can hear fluctuations, as if someone were trying to speak behind all the feedback. His palm sweats against the phone, almost making it slip out of his hand. He switches ears, making out one word amongst the noise. 

_Dean._

“Dean?”

He jerks back to the present, the roar of the waves crashing back down on him like a bucket of cold water. Cas sits only a foot away from him at the most, face clouded over with concern, and Dean hangs up the phone, cutting off the static. 

Cas’s eyes flick down to the phone, hot in Dean’s hand. 

“Who was it?” he asks. 

Dean looks away, preferring to meet Ruth’s eyes than Cas’s at this point.

“Line was dead,” he says.

“Oh,” Cas says, twitching the string around in the grass as Ruth bolts after it and catches it in her claws. “Does that happen a lot?”  


Dean takes another sip from his beer, screwing his face into some kind of casual expression. “Here and there. Doesn’t mean anything.”

Cas nods, and Dean shivers from a new gust of wind. Ruth runs back into the house through the open door.

“Probably wants a treat,” Dean murmurs, getting up to follow and leaving Cas on the step. 

He deposits his phone on the counter, reaching into the low cupboard for the cat treats. He pours a few–well above the recommended serving– into a bowl and places it on the floor in front of Ruth, giving her ears a scratch as he stoops down. 

His phone vibrates again, loud and grating against the counter, and Cas gets to it before Dean can even get to his feet, hand outstretched uselessly. 

“Hello?” he says, the sentiment sounding so much more innocent coming from Cas. Dean drops his arm, nerves churning in his stomach. 

Cas holds the phone to his ear, and Dean can just hear the residual static leaking from the speaker. He hangs up after a few moments, setting the phone back on the counter. 

“How long has this been happening?” Cas asks. 

“What now?” Dean says, knowing how lame it is. 

Cas sighs. “The static. How long have you been getting calls from this number?”

“Getting a weird call isn’t a big deal, Cas. Pretty commonplace these days actually.”

Cas purses his lips. “Feedback that has similar timbre and range as angel radio _is_ strange, Dean, no matter how you try to spin it.”

Dean feels hot again, but this time it’s itchy and uncomfortable, as if someone had him tied up under a spotlight. 

“I’ve only gotten a couple other calls,” he snaps, “And I’m trying not to think about it. You know, trying not to think about how before you came from Purgatory you started appearing everywhere, like you were almost back but not quite.”

Cas’s face falls, and it’s his turn to look guilty. “I remember.”

“Right,” he asserts, turning around to turn the faucet on, cold water pouring out. He evens it out with the hot, starting to wash the bowls from their morning cereal. “When that happened, I barely let myself think about it. I was so sure you were just…”

“Gone.”

“Yup.” His voice is thick sounding to his ears. 

“Dean,” Cas says, and in that moment Dean realizes that they say each other’s names more than any other people he knows. Can’t be normal, all this name saying. Also filed under ‘not normal,’ is the way Cas lays a hand on his arm, squeezing lightly, as if trying to keep him stuck to the Earth. Or maybe pull him up from beneath the ground. Either way. 

“I’ll help you,” Cas says, “If you want.”

Dean doesn’t have to ask what he means. _I’ll help you defy heaven and stop the apocalypse. I’ll help Crowley to keep you safe. I’ll give up my sanity to save your brother. I’ll fight off Leviathan to make sure they stay away from you._

_I’ll help you find your dead brother if that’s what you want._

“No,” Dean says, “We’re leaving this alone.”

Cas nods, not looking altogether convinced. “Ok.” 

Dean nods, turning back to finish the dishes. They never accumulated much in the sink, just the two of them. Not enough to keep his hands truly busy. Cas stays for a moment, hand heavy on his arm, until even he drifts away. The nights arrive sooner now, and he goes out to the porch to call for Ruth to come inside for the night. 

 

* * *

 

Dean wakes up the next day with a nervously churning stomach, but deems it unimportant enough to ignore. He immediately searches for something to occupy his mind, locating the key to the downstairs bedroom (hidden under a pile of laundry they desperately need to take to the laundromat) while Cas starts the coffee pot. 

Dean forces his way through the sticky door, pleasantly surprised when he finds a sun-drenched room with hardwood floors and two large windows. He opens the one that faces the beach, letting the fresh air clear out the mustiness.

Cas follows behind after a few moments. 

“Not bad,” Dean says, turning to him. “I was expecting a nest of squirrels. We’ve even got hardwood.”

“And a closet,” Cas says, poking his head into the small space. 

Dean takes a deep breath, feeling a bit lighter than he had when he had fallen asleep the night before. He can already see where they might place a bed, a night table–maybe they could find a cheap chest of drawers even.

He nods, before moving to turn to Cas. “Good cleaning and a coat of paint should do the job–What?”

He turns to see Cas staring at him, leaning against the closet door frame and smiling like he has a secret. 

Cas shrugs, the smile still in place. 

“I swear to God, you’re gonna tell me or I’ll wipe that smirk off your face,” Dean says, but he feels his own face cracking into a smile. 

Cas opens his mouth, seems to think the better of it, and closes it again, saying, “Maybe when you’re older.”

Dean sighs, laughing, “The only thing I’m doing is getting older, Cas.”

Cas shrugs again, shit-eating grin still intact, and Dean’s arms break out in goosebumps, his body stirring in ways it isn’t used to, not anymore. He swallows hard. 

“The thing is,” Cas starts, pushing off the wall and standing straight, “Perhaps I could be persuaded to tell you.”

On the list of things Dean expected to do today, getting into an impromptu wrestling match with Cas had not made the list. They’re laughing while Cas manages to get him dragged down to the dusty floor, his agility still there despite the fading grace, but Dean gets the upper hand when he gets them both upright again. Cas tries to get his arms wrapped around his middle to drag him down again, but Dean turns the gesture on him and gets a hold of his arms

It doesn’t stop until he’s got Cas against the closet door frame, hands tight on his shoulders and feeling a pleasant strain in his muscles for the first time in a while. There’s a flush to Cas’s cheeks that must be on Dean’s as well and he feels a laugh bubble up in his chest again. It fades when he meets Cas’s eyes, tightening his hands in the fabric of Cas’s t-shirt. 

“Tell me,” Dean says, voice lower than before. 

Cas shakes his head, the motion still playful while his eyes grow serious. Dean feels himself toeing the line, the one that he’s kept in place for years, but he suddenly doesn’t care. He crosses it, stepping further into Cas’s space and feeling the heat coming from his body. Cas’s eyes widen, but his hand comes up to grasp at Dean’s waist, wrinkling his shirt there. His eyes flick down to Cas’s lips. 

Dean’s been here before, but never with Cas. Never with his best friend. 

His phone buzzes on the windowsill behind them, the rattling jerking them both out of the moment. Dean lets go of Cas’s shoulders as if they had burned him. 

“Sorry, Sorry–” Dean says as he turns to go the window, unsure of what he’s even sorry about. He grabs for his phone, looking at the screen.

_Unknown Caller._

His hands shake, and he sets the phone back down on the windowsill without answering. It rings four more times before the words disappear from the screen. 

Cas’s eyes are still wide, but this time with something that looks like fear. Dean stands still, trying to calm his racing heart. 

“Sorry,” he says again, the word sounding stupid before it’s even out of his mouth. 

Cas shakes his head. “No need to be. I think the coffee’s done.”

He leaves, and Dean stills his shaking hands hanging by his sides. 

Cas feigns normalcy when Dean walks back into the kitchen, but Dean can feel the weakening of the facade every time Cas catches him staring at his phone. Cas doesn’t mean to make him feel guilty, never alludes to it in one gesture, but Dean can’t help it. Chalk it up to his upbringing, he thinks. 

He gets out the house later that day, driving into town and stopping at the coffee shop to hook up to the internet. He researches phone glitches or reception problems that could cause static and feedback, finding everything from homemade fixes to forums filled with people complaining about bugs in the software that he couldn’t understand even if he cared to. No one could explain away an epidemic of calls from someone labelled _Unknown_ and Dean leaves feeling empty and disappointed. 

They’d talked about dying enough, sure, had done plenty of it over the years too, but the right thing to do had always been clear. His own words echo in his head, _What’s dead should stay dead_. They’d never been good at making that happen, funnily enough, even if Sam had made his wishes clear. 

“Dammit,” he says, slamming a hand against his steering wheel at a red light, leaving him with nothing but a sore wrist and a staring old lady in the Buick next to him. 

Cas tries to weave himself in the spaces Dean leaves between his distractions, between his fiddling with his phone and muttering, suggesting bed shopping. Dean agrees.

“Dean, this one has a feather topper.”

“You like memory foam, don’t you, Dean?”

Dean just follows Cas around and thanks his lucky stars that they’re in one of those cheap, warehouse-type places where there aren’t salespeople to help you and take wild guesses at your relationship status. Not while his mind is preoccupied with his phone in his pocket.

“What kind of pillows should we get, Dean?”

Cas can barely contain himself, his happiness always welcome sight. Dean wishes he had the energy to respond; to sit on beds and test them out and match his smile with the one Cas seems intent on wearing for the time being. 

“Whatever you like,” he says instead, finding the high road uncomfortable but better than trying to make a decision. 

Cas’s face falls, but he hides most of his disappointment. Dean’s phone feels heavy in his pocket. 

Cas settles for a queen-sized bed with springs but with a memory foam topper. Says that maybe it will last longer than a full memory foam. Dean nods, trying to find it within himself to even care. 

Cas checks them out, handing over one of the good credit cards and paying for it in full. No sense having a payment plan with their history. There’s the usual sweaty moment while they wait for the card to be processed and approved, but the register gives a satisfied click and the cashier hands Cas a receipt to sign without any problems. Whatever account Charlie had them using was still holding out, even while she’s still in Oz. 

They leave with the promise that the bed will be delivered on Friday, sometime in the afternoon. 

Dean drives through the town as if in a fog, Cas nervously pointing out pedestrians and stop signs as if he didn’t expect for Dean to see them. He looks down at his watch when they’re waiting at a stoplight. 5:30–when had it gotten so late?

Cas warns about five blocks away that he wants to stop at the hardware store to look at more paint colors, but Dean still needs a sudden reminder when the entrance the parking lot comes into view. 

“Shit,” Dean says harshly as he turns the car on two wheels. 

Cas’s hands tighten on the door handle. Dean wishes he would have yelled and cursed him out for driving like an asshole. He’s silent like the dead, however, and Dean pulls into a parking space. Cas is out of the car and halfway to the hardware store before he can even get the keys out of the ignition. 

Cas has become a regular at the paint counter, and the same salesperson greets him when he sees him coming. 

“Hey, Cas! Back for more fun?”

Cas smiles, but Dean notices that it’s tight-lipped. “Yes. Something for a bedroom this time.”

“What did you have in mind?”

Dean lets Cas chat with the kid while he drifts off, looking at the proverbial sea of paint colors in front of him. Reds with names like _Rumors_ and _Red Carpet Ready,_ along with blues that were described with every nautical euphemism in the English language. Dean’s used to soft neutrals in the bunker and horrible wallpaper or sponge painting in the motels they frequented on the road, not soft colors that are described with fancy words. Sam probably would have liked this. Probably would have bent over the samples with Cas and talked about it for hours before making a decision. 

He can’t help but think that if Sam were here he would care more, too. Maybe if he called a few old contacts–ask them how you track an unknown number, maybe it would be possible if they found some decent internet–  

He hears something spoken in his direction, and before he has a chance to think, Cas and the salesperson are staring at him, eyes wide as if they were looking for an answer. 

“I guess,” he starts, sifting through his head for any words that had been spoken, “I guess whichever one you like, Cas.”

Cas’s brow dips, a shadow of anger and impatience settling on his features and Dean knows he fucked up. 

“You just agreed to the room being painted neon pink with a flowery trim.” He shoves the paint sample at Dean’s chest, “Enjoy it.”

He storms off, leaving Dean with a dry mouth and slow hands that can’t even catch the sample before it floats to the ground. A soft, light brown, contrary to what Cas had said. 

“Fuck,” he mutters, voice harsh in the quiet store. 

He manages to smile at the horrified salesperson before picking up the sample and turning on his heel to follow Cas. He sees the brown, tousle-haired head move through the automatic doors. Cas walks at a steady clip, arms swinging angrily by his sides. 

Outside it’s cold and almost completely dark, and Dean’s not dressed for what the weather lady had promised would be the coldest night yet of the season. The sweat on his forehead seizes up from the shock of cold air as he runs to keep up. 

“Cas!” he calls.

Cas stops when he gets to the Impala, hands balled into fists at his side. 

“What?” he all but snarls. 

Dean stops, unsure of what to say. He shuffles his feet, stomach in knots. 

Cas turns around, eyes shining. 

“For once, Dean,” he starts, “Just for once I’d like to feel like I’m not all alone here.”

Dean tenses, his fists clenching at his sides. He doesn’t need this right now, not with an unlisted number calling him and his mind feeling like it’s 100 times more fucked up than it ever was. 

“Are you trying to pick a fight?” He asks, “Because I thought we were done with that.”

Cas pulls a hand through his hair, pulling wildly. “I’m not picking a fight.”

“Really?” Dean says, his voice taking on a bravado that even he hated to hear. “Last time I checked you sound like you’re on the offensive. I’ve fought plenty in my life.”

Cas doesn’t respond, his tongue firmly lodged in his cheek. 

“What do you want from me, Cas?” He asks, throwing his arms out wide, “I’m never going to be anything other than who I am right now. I’ve got blood on my hands and a lifetime of trauma.”

“Dean–”

“And I’m fucking _trying_.” Sirens go off in the distance, and he yells over them. “I’m trying to fix up the house and my broken-down life but I can’t do it if you–” He stops, resting his hands on his hips. 

“If I do what, Dean?” he asks, voice soft but murderous. 

“If you expect this shit from me!” he explodes, “You forget that I’ve already done all this, Cas. I’ve had the family and the house and home improvement projects. It was all shot to _shit_ in less than a year because we don’t get to be happy.”

“So we’re just going to sit and wait for some other cataclysm to end whatever peace we might have right now? And be miserable in the mean time, staring at your _phone_ more than you look at me–”

“Fuck you,” Dean whispers. “What did you think? That we would play boyfriends while my brother’s fucking _dead?_ ”

Cas’s face relaxes, but his eyes remain hard. 

“You say you’re trying, Dean, but why did you have to scream all of that to me in the _fucking_ hardware store parking lot?” He pulls at his hair, “Your brother is dead, but we’re alive. How do you expect to move on if you’re looking for a way for him to come back? He’s _dead_ Dean.”

Dean shakes his head, breath rasping through his throat as if he had been punched in the gut.

“ _Fuck_ you,” he says again, gripping his keys hard enough to bite the skin of his hand. 

Cas shakes his head, backing away before he turns and starts to walk towards town. 

“Fine,” Dean calls, “Find your own way home

Cas raises a hand, a caustic wave before he shoves his hands back into his pockets. Dean stares at him until he turns a corner and walks out of sight. 

Dean stands panting as if he had run a marathon, his breath foggy in the freezing night air. A familiar feeling starts to creep up from the ground; a feeling he gets when everyone leaves the room, fed-up with his nonsense and ill-socialized personality. This time, there’s only Cas to leave.  

That’s it then. He’s alone. 

After a few minutes he can start to see lights flickering off at nearby businesses, and his hands feel near cold enough to fall off. He gets back into the Impala, blasting the heat as high as it goes and enduring the cold air until the car starts to heat up. 

He turns in the opposite direction Cas had taken, mad enough to not want to see him but worried enough that he doesn’t want the pain in the ass to freeze to death. He grips the steering wheel hard enough to turn his knuckles white; only loosening them when they start to ache. 

... _Staring at your fucking phone more than you look at me–_

Dean knows fights are pointless. They always end before anyone can say what they really want to say, right after you’ve blurted out something that you don’t mean. Dean knows he hasn’t been looking at his phone that much, no more than usual–but he’s been thinking about it enough to make his heart ache where it sits in his chest. He didn’t think Cas could notice that. 

Sam would never be gone. He had realized that even as they built the pyre right in front of the beach, laying Sam’s body out for the last time among trees and the roar of the ocean. Didn’t matter that they burned all his clothes and favorite things, Sam’s ghost still clung to him. He couldn’t open a laptop without thinking of him, or drive in his car, or even look in the damn mirror. 

And it wasn’t like he could use Cas to just fill that space–that wouldn’t be fair. He deserves more than that. More than moments where Dean can’t even get up the nerve to move it forward. More than the weird little half-life Dean could give him, out of space and time. 

His phone buzzes in his pocket, surprising him enough to jerk the wheel and probably look like a drunk driver. He fishes it out of his pocket, expecting it to be Cas or the unknown caller, and groaning when he sees the name flash across the screen. Well, he’s ignored it long enough.

“Jody,” he starts, laying on the charm thick in his voice, “It’s been a long time.”

“Long time, lot’s of texts,” Jody replies, the midwestern laziness to her voice making him relax if only a little bit. “How are things going?”

“Going good,” he says, adding extra perk, “How’s Alex?”

“Eh, it’s a give and take. I like having her around though.” A pause, Jody sounds like she switches the phone to her other ear. “How’s Cas?”

“All good,” he says probably too quickly.

“Huh. Doesn’t sound like it.”

Dean curses himself under his breath. “Things are good Jody, really.”

“If you say so,” she says with the indication that it’s a subject they’ll return to sooner rather than later. “Whereabouts are you two now?”  


Dean licks his lips, chapped dry from the cold. He contemplates a lie, a hunt, their typical life on the road–before settling with something even more painful. 

“We’re in Maine these days.”

“These days? As in, more than three days?”

“Yup,” he says, “Got a beach house and everything.”

“Well what d’you know. That must’ve cost you.”

Dean laughs darkly. “You’d think.”

Jody laughs, but it’s short lived. He feels it coming, loud and painful and unstoppable– 

“So, how are you doing? With–everything?”

“Jody…”

“I just want to know that you’re ok. That’s all,” he says defensively, “And if you’re not, that’s ok too. These things don’t just disappear. But you’ve still got people who care about you, Dean, as much as you fight that.”

Dean sighs. “Thanks. That means a lot.”

“Don’t mention it.” The air lightens. “I’m assuming Cas is with you?”

“Yeah. Not right now, but he’s here.” He laughs to himself. “We got a fucking cat.”

Jody bursts out laugh, the sound hearty. “Aren’t you extremely allergic?”

“Allergy meds. Apparently they’ve gotten better in the last twenty years. Still sneeze all the time though.”

“I’m sure Cas had something to do with it.”

“You’d be right in assuming.”

There’s a pause, filled with everything unsaid. Dean can feel the words almost out of her mouth but not quite, as lethal as they are useless– _I miss him, I think about him all the time, I think about the time we wasted, and I don’t know if you can be ok without him._

Dean doesn’t need Jody to say them to hear it. They hang up shortly after, with Jody promising to visit and bring Alex to the beach there at some point. It’s a long way, but she can do it, she promises. 

Dean drives around, looking for Cas’s form hunched against the cold. After the third round, he gets back on the road back to the house, knowing his fear for Cas is silly at best. And Dean doesn’t know if he can look at him anyway, not with the way they left it. 

In the end, all he can do is collapse in bed, keeping one ear open for Cas coming home. 

 

~

 

Dean wakes up to the slam of the front door, the night still and quiet outside the window. A slight flurry swirls around in the darkness under the outside light; the first of the season. He twists the blankets around him tighter, warding off the chill. 

He keeps up the pretense of sleep while Cas toes off his shoes and throws his coat over the folding chair in the kitchen. Cas doesn’t look at him, however, instead he gathers the few extra blankets and towels that they’ve accumulated, lining the cracks and openings in the doors and windows to keep out the cold. Dean caulking job needs another coat; it sits cracked and shrunken already from the cold and it filters in through the cracks, giving them their own private snow cloud. 

Cas seems unfamiliar somehow, as if he hadn’t looked at him in a long time. Dean’s old shirts fit him well enough, but tend to be a little tight in the arms and hips. He prefers bare feet even in the cold, and takes trips down to the ocean at least once a day, leaving his hair a constant mess. Through all that, Dean sees that he’s moving differently, slowly, as if every motion brought him some modicum of pain. 

Cas finishes checking the windows, leaning over and gripping the last sill, hands digging into the salt lines without breaking them. 

“Dean?” Cas says, the word a question. 

Dean faces the wall, and Cas would never know if he simply pretended to be asleep. He doesn’t do that, instead sitting up and feeling the cold hit his skin. 

“Yeah, Cas?” he replies. 

Cas sighs, turning around and leaning against the window frame. 

“I’m sorry.”

Dean scoffs, looking away. “Come on, man–”

Cas holds up a hand, similar to the way he used to smite demons, but now covered in calluses and paint stains. 

“I shouldn’t have blamed you.” he says, “You shouldn’t be forced to feel something that you’re not feeling. And you need to grieve–however long you need to. I was wrong."

Dean squirms under the heaviness of Cas’s gaze. “It wasn’t–anything big, Cas. Just me being miserable and taking it out on you. You’re trying to make things good here and I…” he trails off. 

“Of course.” Cas turns back around, where snow is still swirling around outside the window. It melts into rain as soon as it hits the window. Dean watches as Cas’s shoulders tense, his arms crossed in front of his chest. He takes a deep breath, blowing it out with a shakiness Dean has never heard before. 

“My grace is gone.”

Dean sinks, as if the mattress had deflated again. 

“Cas,” he croaks out.

“I mean, the grace that I stole,” Cas rambles, “It wasn’t mine anyway. I’m relieved that it’s gone.”

Dean’s aging bones don’t allow him to get up as quick as he would like, but he makes it up and gets to the window, landing a hand on Cas’s shoulder. Cas looks at him, putting on a reassuring smile.

“How long?” Dean asks.

_How long have you been hiding this from me? How long have you been getting tired and sleeping through the night and seeing things in only seven colors like the rest of us? How long have I been ignoring you?_

“A few weeks.”

“How did you know?”

Cas laughs: a small, dark sound. “Nothing big happened. I started becoming constantly hungry and food started tasting good again. And I woke up with a neck ache that still hasn’t gone away.”

“Fucking mattress,” Dean mumbles, thinking about how adamant Cas had been about getting a new mattress and how he had dragged his feet for weeks. 

“I didn’t want you to worry, when I knew it was fading,” Cas says, “There’s so much going on in your head. It was the last thing I could hear as an angel, the hum of your thoughts. I knew that even though you were quiet, you were suffering. But then the grace was gone–I couldn’t hear it anymore.”

Dean drops his hand, crossing his arms. “ _Fuck,_ Cas. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You’ve had other things on your mind,” Cas repeats. 

“Yeah but–” Dean stammers, trying to find the right words, “You’re not just my fucking roommate here. This shitty life didn’t just happen to me, you’re in this too. And that’s on me.”

Cas shrugs. “There’s no good in trying to place blame, Dean.”

Dean throws his hands in the air, knowing it makes him look like a toddler. “Why should we? I blame myself, that’s for damn sure.”

Cas’s face falls. “Dean–”

“I _get_ to blame myself, Cas. And I will, as long as my brother is in ashes and you’re saddled here with me, fucked up as I am.”

Cas shakes his head, moving closer into Dean’s space, breath turning to fog in the chill by the window. “I have a will of my own. So did your brother.”

“My brother thought he was a fucking _stain_ on the Earth. He thought that he owed it to the world to die. He’s always been trying to die, thinking everyone would be better off.” He swallows, the words leaving a bitter taste in his mouth. “ _Fuck_ that. _Fuck_ him for leaving me here.”

Cas doesn’t respond to that, instead rubbing a hand over his face. Dean counts it as one of the human gestures he still has to get used to, especially now that Cas is all human all the time now. His own hands shake at his sides, and he tries to make them sit still. 

“Dean,” Cas says, “Sam saved the world. He saved you.”

“Doesn’t matter. He still died thinking that he was a piece of shit and I never did a thing to correct that.” He shakes his head. “I can still feel him here, how scared he was. Scared of me.”

Cas’s eyes grow hard at the words, and he takes Dean by the shoulders, gripping hard. 

“You loved your brother, Dean. You still loved him even though your father never gave you the right definition of it. You loved him enough to give your life for him.”

Dean shakes his head, throat thickening. He flexes his hands by his sides. 

“I’m not saying it was perfect,” Cas goes on, “But it’s what happened and it was enough, for the time you had. And now you have to accept that your brother loved you enough too.”

Cas’s hands sit heavy on his shoulders, making it hard for Dean to draw breath. He shakes them off, backing up, running a dry hand over his mouth. 

“I don’t want you to stick up for me.” Dean says, shaking his head. “You do that all the time, you know that? Just like when I let Gadreel fuck around inside my brother.”

Cas swallows, his hand reaching up to grab at the window-frame. “So should I just hate you like you hate yourself?”

“Fucking-A Cas–”

“I’m not going to sit around and just let you self-destruct. I meant it when I said it then and I mean it now. Everything you’ve ever done has been for your brother. So he could be safe. That doesn’t make it right, but it doesn’t make you a bad person, either.”

Dean shakes his head, looking down at his feet through eyes that swim with tears he won’t let fall. He swipes a hand across his mouth, sighing. He doesn’t look up at Cas, knowing that his eyes will bore a hole right through him.

“My brother died here, Cas. I know–he saved me and he saved the world. But he’s _here_ –and if he’s the one calling me–trying to find me–” he stops, swallowing back a sob that threatened to shatter him. 

“Whatever it is, Dean,” Cas meets Dean eyes. “Whatever it is, I promise I’ll help you with it. We’ll figure it out. Just don’t do anything you might regret. We have enough of that in spades.”

_We’ll figure it out_. Dean hears his own words said back to him and suddenly feels exhausted, as if he could sleep for weeks. 

“Can we table this?” he asks after a few beats of silence, making every effort to lighten his voice, “I’m fucking exhausted and you just walked around in the cold for four hours like an idiot. Let’s just–sleep.”

Cas nods. He takes Dean by the arm and leads him to the side of the air mattress. Dean’s awake now, but something about the touch makes a sleepiness settle over him where their argument had rooted it out. He had fallen asleep in boxers and a t-shirt before, but now cold seeps into his bones. 

Cas seems to sense this, grabbing them both a pair of sweatpants out of the duffel bags sitting next to the bed. Over a month in Maine, and they’re still living out of suitcases. Still pretending like this isn’t their home now. 

“Dean,” Cas says, dipping his head to the side as if he were trying to catch Dean’s eye, “I don’t want you to be up all night beating yourself up.”

Dean laughs, the sound catching on something in the darkness. “What are the odds that I ever get a good night’s sleep ever again?”

Cas laughs softly, the sound lighter than anything Dean had heard come from him that night. 

“I’ll make you a deal,” he says.

Dean cocks an eyebrow. “Ok.”

“If you promise to sleep, I’ll tell you what I was thinking the other day, when we looked at the bedroom for the first time,” Cas says.

Dean’s stomach twists, nerves sending waves of feeling down to his toes. He had been curious then, painfully so, but now he feels hesitant. He swallows. 

“Alright, let me hear it.”

Cas smiles. “I had been thinking… while you stood in the sun, that I would trade all my lives in heaven if I got to live this life with you. If you would let me stay with you.”

Dean stands frozen, his hands rigid by his sides. “Cas… I–”

Cas sighs, shaking his head as if to quiet him. He runs his hand over Dean’s by his side, fingers tracing lightly at his wrist and then at the soft skin where the Mark used to be. It grazes his shoulder, a safe spot, still familiar, but Dean’s heart beats into his throat when it touches his neck.

Dean swallows hard and makes a turn for the bed, stooping and lying down on the wobbly air mattress before Cas can do any other fancy things with his hands. Calloused hands. Hands that painted the house and hands that catch Ruth when she won’t come in for the night and hands that had wrapped around him and pulled him straight up from Hell–more than just the one time. 

The bed is smaller that night, especially when Cas crawls in behind him, arms circling his waist with hesitation. Dean talks himself through it, allowing himself to sink back, feeling Cas’s chest pressed up against his back. Dean’s eyes flutter shut as Cas buries his head against his neck, lips trailing softly against the hair at the nape of his neck, almost imperceptible. 

“Dean,” Cas whispers, breath warm against Dean’s skin, “Can I… I want you to feel better. I want to make you feel better.”

Dean turns over, seeing the darkness of Cas’s eyes and the way his hair falls just so in his eyes. He needs a haircut, they both do. He leans in, running a hand through it and pulling Cas closer. He exhales, letting his next word out with it.  

“Ok.”

Cas nods, almost frantic, leaning in as Dean’s eyes fall shut.

_Better_ apparently means _stoned out of your mind_ because the next step is Cas’s lips on his and Dean swears that after a second of it he could lay off whiskey for good, as long as he still had access to Cas’s mouth. 

Barriers try to stop them; a pillow tries to wedge itself between their faces and Dean’s legs are twisted in the sheets but he manages to throw them off, nearly elbowing Cas in the face but just missing him–and finding his lips again. This time they’re open, sighing right into Dean’s mouth as he presses down with the weight of his body, trying to find all the spots where they don’t meet and making them come together: fingers lacing, hips meeting flush, anything he can make happen. 

Dean dips down to breathe and kisses at Cas’s neck while he’s there, sucking until Cas gasps in his ear and brings his hands up to knead against Dean back, urging him closer. 

“ _Cas_ ,” he says. 

_Don’t ever leave._

_Don’t ever change._

_Don’t ever let me hurt you._

“ _Cas,”_ Dean says again, instead, face burning, “I want to make you feel better too.”

Cas drags him back down, flipping them and sliding his hands under Dean’s shirt while he kisses him senseless. It’s a whole host of surreal moments wrapped up in one: sleet swirling outside the window, waves crashing against a cold shore, and Cas’s lips and hands everywhere–pressing him back until there’s no space left for thought. 

 

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

Dean wakes up to his phone vibrating, jerking out of a sound sleep and lashing out with a hand that searches for an invisible gun. He spots the phone, lying on the floor next to the mattress and rattling against the hard wood from the force of its ringing. He throws the blankets off, shivering as he exposes more skin to frigid cold. It’s a far cry from falling asleep warm and comfortable as Cas rubbed slow circles into his back. 

He doesn’t dare look at the caller ID but his heart pounds all the same. 

“Yeah?”

“Wow, never thought I’d get this number.”

He deflates. A woman’s voice answers–  English, and vaguely familiar. 

“Hang on,” he says, putting the phone down and grabbing Cas’s zip-up hoodie from where it spills from a duffel bag. He glances at Cas, sleeping soundly–  almost snoring–  with one arm thrown over his face. He swallows hard, feeling his skin crawling as he shoves his arms into the the jacket and slips into his boots before heading out the front door.

“Who is this?” he asks as soon as he hits the chill of the gray morning. 

“It’s Tamara, Dean.”

Dean’s stomach turns; the image of a younger, more frightened version of himself watching an innocent man die in the most horrendous way. 

“Tamara,” he repeats, “It’s been awhile.”

“That it has,” she says, “I wish I were calling to catch up, but I’m afraid this is business. I’ve heard you’re in New England area.”

Dean raises his eyebrows, never doubting that word still travels fast even without demons to motivate hunters. “You’d be right on that. I’m just wondering how.”

She laughs, a musical sound over the airwaves. “Some of my family live in the colonies, Dean, and it just so happens that I have a cousin that fixed your floor.”

Dean tenses up, then exhales. “Mara.”

“Precisely. She’s a former hunter as well–  said she smelled it on your two and couldn’t resist helping out.”

“Figures,” Dean mutters, a familiar quote from The Godfather ringing in his ears, “Well, what can I do for you Tamara?”

“Brilliant,” she continues, “I was wondering if you’d be interested in taking on a hunt in Auburn, Maine. Small town, lot’s of disappearances."

“Vamps?”

“Doesn’t seem to be their style. Some of my colleagues in my parts think it might be a witch, but I’m trying to tell them that there just isn’t enough demon energy these days to support a common witch.”

“Then what do you think?”

Tamara hesitates. “Well, I don’t know. I haven’t been involved in hunting for some time. Trying to settle down–  all that sentimental nonsense.”

Dean laughs, glancing back through the the screen door to see Ruth trying to claw her way outside. He mouths “Too cold” at her, devastated when he realizes that he just seriously spoke to a cat. 

“I hear you loud and clear on that,” he says, nerves starting to prickle at his scalp. He can feel Cas’s presence in the house; he’s probably starting to move around now–  they would need to talk, but Dean already has 30+ years of radio feedback clouding his head. 

“Yeah,” he says, the words tumbling from his mouth before he can stop them, “I’ll help you out.”

He can hear her relief over the phone, another hunter taking on the temptation, he supposes. “Thank you so much, Dean–  really. Thank you.”

He waves away her gratitude while jotting down the address and whereabouts on a scrap of paper he found in his pocket. 

“Oh and Dean,” she says as they’re starting to hang up, “I heard about your brother. I’m so sorry.”

Dean sighs. “Thanks, Tamara. I appreciate it.”

They hang up a few minutes after, her voice disappearing back into the fog of his past–  before there had been hell in his memories. He steps back through the screen door, dodging Ruth and holding her back from sneaking out into the cold. 

Cas is still asleep when he reenters the house, their late-night excursions obviously keeping him tethered to the bed. His lips are chapped from the cold the night before, but Dean doesn’t care. He could crawl back into bed, sleep more and kiss Cas good morning when he wakes.

Toeing out of his shoes to lessen the noise, he moves around the room like a ghost, grabbing a spare pair of jeans and a few shirts he knows Cas isn’t too fond of and stuffing them into a mostly empty duffel bag. His Fed suit is still in a garment bag in the Impala, gathering dust, but he’ll have to just deal with it. 

He’s got the bag on his shoulder, a fresh pair of pants on, and his shoes fully tied when he realizes it doesn’t take much to pack up and leave a place you were never really settled into to begin with. 

Ruth starts to wind through his legs, meowing softly for food. It’s usually Cas’s job–  but he’s still asleep with little sign of getting up yet. 

“Alright come on,” he whispers, setting his bag down and walking into the kitchen with the cat on his heels. 

 

 

He opens a can of the ridiculously overpriced food Cas buys for her and and spoons half of it into a bowl. He sets it down and then goes to refill the water bowl.

He watches her eat for a moment, absentmindedly stooping down and scratching behind her ears. 

“Now, I know you’re the type to drift and go where you please, but Cas is counting on you to stick around,” he says, “You gotta do that, for him.”

She takes a break from eating to look at him, the same condescending look she always has on her face, and then goes back to her food full time. 

He returns to the door to fetch his bag, shouldering it and feeling the ache already from its heaviness. Cas had turned onto his stomach and buried his head into one of the pillows, his dark hair sticking up in places. He breathes softly, and Dean can’t help but remember that same breath on his skin.

He turns his back, opening and closing the front door without a sound. Once he’s in the Impala, he shoots Cas a text. 

_Got a hunt. Be back soon._

He can just barely hit the send button before his phone is vibrating is his hand, this time the caller ID flashing _Unknown Caller_ right in his face before he can ignore it. He answers it without thinking.

“Hello?”

He jerks the phone away from ear; the static is accompanied by a loud screeching, as if the phone were getting interference. He keeps it close. 

“Who is this?” he says into it, nerves blooming in his gut. 

More static, along with a strange warping in the sound. Some of the feedback clears, revealing the sound of a voice. 

“I–” he hears, cut off quickly. 

“What?” he almost yells, “Say it again!”

“I–” they stutter, followed back, “Back.”

A high-pitched keening overcomes the rest of the noise, causing Dean to gasp and drop the phone below his seat. He fumbles for it, pressing it to his ear.

“Hello? Who’s there?”

No response. He checks the screen. Call failed. 

“Dammit!” he growls, throwing the phone onto the passenger seat. After a moment he grabs it again, powering it down until the screen is black. 

He twists the key in the ignition, the Impala surging to life. 

 

* * *

 

He makes it there in under an hour. Auburn isn’t much of a city, and it sits just like any town that’s seen its industry and business whittle down to almost nothing. He drives through to a small mall, dusting off his suit and throwing it on in a run-down bathroom. 

There isn’t much a downtown to speak of, and he drives through it squinting at the side buildings for any sign of the police department. He manages to follow a patrol car south for two blocks, pulling into the department parking lot after it. 

He flashes his badge at the front desk, the receptionist buzzing him through a heavy door. The small station is a flurry of activity, clearly unused to any excitement this large. They’re not surprised to see him, since one of the victims turns out to be underage and falls under kidnapping. He talks to the patrol officers on the case, getting the specifics and a few family names to check out. He notes that one of the names is the same as one on the nametag of one of the officers. 

Things are complicated, in small towns. 

He’s back in his car with all the info and a splitting headache within the hour. He rests his head against the steering wheel, listening to wheeze of his own breath. His stomach growls, and he realizes that he had forgotten to eat. He twists the key in the ignition, looking out for a safe moment to pull out. 

He glances at the passenger seat while waiting, the cars limping by like typical Sunday drivers.  For the first time since leaving Old Orchard Beach, he dares a look at his phone. He taps the steering wheel while it powers up, taking longer than usual to find service. When it finally connects, it only buzzes twice. Two text messages from Cas. No missed calls. 

He sighs, disappointed that he feels disappointed. He taps the message button, taking in the short messages from Cas. 

_Ok._

_Be safe._

He scoffs, tossing the phone back on the seat and easing out of his parking space. He used to attribute all of Cas’s quirks to his awkwardness. Now he knows better. 

Son of a bitch could be petty as hell like everyone else, and he probably has a right to be after Dean had skipped out when they needed to do a lot of talking. 

He grabs a burger in a less-than functional McDonalds, eating it while driving without really tasting anything besides grease and salt. His phone stays quiet on the passenger seat, and he only touches it to pocket it before heading into the first victim’s family’s house. 

The house sits far back from the side-street road, looking like it was patchworked together from several other houses. Two cars sit on grass to the side, and when Dean gets closer he notices that one is up on cinder blocks. 

He knocks on the front door, hearing a dog bark from the inside followed by a woman’s voice. 

“Settle down!”

The door opens, revealing the holder of the voice–  a short, pale woman with frizzy hair desperately trying to escape from her bun. She looks to be in her late twenties. 

“Can I help you?” she asks, looking Dean up and down wearily, her expression implying that she thought she might be sorry that she opened the door. 

“Mrs. Peterson?”

She nods.

Dean flashes the badge. “Agent Daniels, ma’am. FBI, inquiring about the disappearance of your husband. Could we talk for a few minutes?”

She purses her lips, swallowing before nodding and stepping aside. “Come in.”

“Thank you.”

She leads him through a narrow hallway into a plain sitting room with a green plaid couch. The dog reveals itself: a black lab that sits next to Mrs. Peterson and stares at Dean as if he has done something to personally offend him. Maybe he has, his memory is shit these days. 

“So what can I do for you?” she asks quietly after a few moments. 

He nods. “I’m here to inquire a little about your husband, Jonathan.”

“Jack,” she corrects. 

“Jack,” he says, nodding, “Police say the timeline is up to two weeks now, and still no leads?”

“That’s right.”

“I was just wondering what you could tell me about the night your husband disappeared.”

Her eyes narrow, and she reaches down to scratch at the dog’s neck. “I’ve already told the police.”

“I just have to get a separate report. Logistics really.”

She sits back. “We had just gone to the grocery store. We got to the car, and then I realized that I had forgotten to get bread. He pulled the car up to the store so I could run in quick. When I got back, he was–  gone. Car was still running.”

“And what time was that at?”

“Around 7PM.”

Dean pretends to write a few notes on his pad. “Was there anything going on that night outside? Any suspicious characters or witnesses? Any strange noises?”

She shakes her head. “No. At least not that I remember.”

Dean sits back. “Tell me about your husband. What does he do for a living?”

She adjusts herself in her seat, looking uncomfortable. “He’s a waiter at Applebees.”

“Was he happy in his job? Were things going well?”

Her mouth trembles. “Honestly, that night he had just been let go. We were–  we were a little stressed to say the least.”

Dean frowns. “I’m sorry to hear that. Had you been arguing? Any reason he might have taken off?”

“I don’t think so,” she says, “We had been quiet, things were tense. But I hadn’t given him a hard time–  I knew it wasn’t his fault. Money’s always been tight.”

“Had he been talking about anything strange? Things he saw or experienced that he couldn’t explain?”

Fear passes over her face, and she only shakes her head. 

Dean reaches into his jacket pocket, pulling out the pictures of the three other victims the police had given him: Qin Han, Tina Morris, and Dante Lewis.

“Any of these faces look familiar? Any relation to your husband? Colleagues or acquaintances even?”

“I already told the police. I’ve never seen any of these people in my life. Or heard their names.”

As she answers Dean’s phone begins to buzz in his pocket, vibrating loudly against the arm of the chair. The dog’s head snaps up, barking and moving to come at Dean before Mrs. Peterson takes a hold of his collar. 

“I’m so sorry!” she calls over the barking. “He’s never like this!”

Dean shrinks back, all the sudden feeling cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. His phone still buzzes and the dog snarls, showing teeth. 

“That’s alright,” he manages to say, “I’ve got all the information I need–  I can get out of your hair.”

She shows him to the door, apologizing profusely for the growling dog on the end of her short leash. 

She holds back the dog at the door, looking like she has more to say. 

“Is there something else?” he asks.

“It’s just that–  last year, down south on the coast there had been a lot of disappearances–  a lot of violent deaths I mean. Does this have anything to do with that?”

Dean could sink through the ground until it swallowed him up, shame burning at the back of his neck.

“No,” he says thickly, “I can reassure you that this has nothing to do with that investigation.”

She nods, and he bids her farewell before moving in a controlled fall back to his car and whipping out his phone, trying to drown out the sound of the fear in Mrs. Peterson’s voice. 

_Missed call: Unknown number_

He sighs, relieved and disappointed all at once–  he couldn’t call back an unknown number even if he wanted to. The air is thick around him, however, and he’s unsettled down to his toes. He had taken careful measures to make sure he never heard about his exploits as a Knight of Hell, but this had been his hub–  he should have known it was coming. He rests his head on the steering wheel, trying to calm down the nausea bubbling in his gut. 

He tries to distract himself by flipping through the rest of his phone, finding another three missed text messages from Cas sitting in his inbox. He hesitates before opening them, his thumb hovering over the link to their conversation.

_We can forget about what happened last night._

_Just come home._

_I promise we don’t have to talk about it._

And if that doesn’t make Dean feel like a piece of shit he doesn’t know what will. It’s a cliche, it’s old, it’s self-hating–  but Cas truly does deserve better. Someone new, someone younger, someone who could love him and kiss him without feeling the need to jump on the next bus out of town. Someone who can let the dead stay dead. 

It isn’t commitment. Commitment is the only thing he knows how to do, truly. But committing to the right thing? That he still has a hard time getting right. 

He pulls up at the second house, across town and in a significantly more affluent neighborhood. This time when he knocks, it takes a few minutes for someone to come to the door. 

“Who’s there?” a deep voice calls through the wood. 

“FBI,” Dean says, rifling through his coat for his badge, “Open the door a crack and I’ll show my identification.”

He hears several chains fall from the door before the person on the other side does just that, a dark eye squinting at Dean’s ID through the door. His lips purse before he opens the door wider. 

“What can I do for you?” he says, a tall man with light brown skin and hands stained with concrete. 

“I’m sorry to bother you. Joseph Morris, is it?”

The man nods. 

“I’m Agent Daniels. I’m here to ask a few questions about your daughter, Tina.”

Morris crosses his arms. “Go ahead. Ask.”

Dean fidgets, caught off guard at the opposite behavior compared to Mrs. Peterson. “Can you tell me about the night Tina disappeared?” He fishes for his pen and paper. 

Morris sighs, shaking his head. “I’m assuming you know the date it happened?”

“Yes, sir.”

He tightens his arms, and starts talking in a rush. “Tina had a rough day that day. I told the police that she suffered from depression, and some days were better than others. Usually–  when she’d run off, she’d go to a friend that lives just up the road. I kept calling and calling their house, but she never showed up there. And then a day went by, and so on.”

“Any strange things happen? Strange people or feelings you had that night?”

Morris’s eyebrows dip. “Nothing. Just a normal night.”

Dean stares at him for a moment, noting the way the muscle in the man’s jaw jumps as they stand there, and he decides it’s time for him to go. 

“Thank you for your time. Let me know if you see anything or remember anything else.”

Morris nods, letting Dean turn around and walk halfway down the path before calling out. 

“Tina was troubled.” Dean turns around, raising his eyebrows. “I already told the cops this–  but she would go to the abandoned factories sometimes. Usually with friends, sometimes alone. They couldn’t find anything.” He shakes his head. “Maybe you will, though.”

Dean bites his lip, the sorrow on the man’s face hard to watch. “I’ll do my best sir.”

 

* * *

 

Dean grips the steering wheel hard as he makes his way back to the motel. Unhappy people, unhappy moments. All caught up in supernatural bullshit during moments of distress. 

It smells familiar, and Dean wonders where he’s gonna get lamb’s blood. 

Djinn don’t usually do something so overt as taking four people at the same time, but desperation brings out the worst in monsters when they’re hungry enough–  driven to the edge by being at the fringes of society. He keys into the motel feeling exhausted, not knowing where to start. The hunt is an obvious one, location being the only remaining variable. The factories Tina’s father had talked about were promising, but he feels the need to regain more energy before going out on a search.

The texts from Cas sit like a ticking time bomb in his phone, and he sits on his bed typing out several replies, all deleted immediately after their inception. 

_We don’t have to ignore it._

_That’s probably for the best, we don’t need to mess up a good thing._

_None of this is your fault._

_I’ll be home soon._

He settles with something generic, acting as if he never even received texts that seemed to bare some of Cas’s soul. 

_It’s a djinn. Should be a piece of cake. Be home soon._

He watches as the text delivers and sits for a few moments. No sign of him typing back. Dean throws the phone to the side, facedown into the cheap quilt. He lies back, closing his eyes and wishing for all the world that he had a bottle of something. Anything. 

He settles for sleeping instead, drifting off into that heavy dozing state that had sustained him for thirty odd years before they had found a real home with a real bed. His limbs are heavy at least and it’s easy to dream. 

Stars burst behind his eyelids, dancing and swinging this way and that–  morphing into figures that twist and turn to the rhythm of his breathing. He sees Cas for a while, the way he had softly folded himself against Dean while they kissed, the way his lips hadn’t pushed too much, as if he thought Dean might break. His hands had been firm, however, mapping out his body with sweeps along his sides and pulling at his hair while bringing them both over the edge. 

The scene changes–  Cas morphing into his old self with stiff shoulders covered in a trench coat. He feels hot, and his skins jumps under hands that move his head this way and that, accommodating a needle that burns when it touches him. 

_Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus. Hanc animam redintegra, lustra. Lustra._

The words are a whisper, nothing like the confident exclamation he had heard months before. They press in close to him, repeating and repeating until they become jumbling, a writhing, teeming mass of whispering screams. He opens his eyes; the room is empty–  

Save for a tall, sturdy shadow by the door, the outline of its hair moving slowly in the breeze coming from the open window. 

He fumbles for his gun–  realizing that he had left it in the car, realizing that he hadn’t even put a salt line in front of the door, but when he looks back, the shadow is gone. 

His phone starts to vibrate on the bed, and it’s only then that he realizes how fast his heart is beating and how ragged his breathing feels. He grabs for it, praying that it’s Cas or Jody or Mara or _anyone_.

_Unknown Caller._

He swallows hard, pressing the answer button, his voice shaking as soon as he speaks. 

“H-Hello?”

No static, no feedback–  just a long moment of silence before an excited exclamation.

“Dean!!”

A woman’s voice–  excited and familiar and the most disappointing thing Dean’s ever heard. 

“Charlie?”

“Yes!! _Fuck_ yes I’ve been trying to reach you for a solid month.”

Dean’s stomach sinks to his feet, and he lies back, covering his face with his free hand. 

“So it’s been you?”

“What? Dean can you speak up?”

“You’ve been the unknown number?” He almost yells, voice harsh, “These past few weeks?” 

“I guess so. I’ve been trying to reach you and all I’d get was static and horrible feedback.”

“Where the hell are you?”

Charlie takes a breath, and Dean sinks back for the story. “Well, I’ve been in Oz. I managed to rig up some kind of digital grid, and we were using it to fight invaders back from the Emerald city. I tried to reach you, thinking that the cell waves might make it across the divide. No dice I guess, but I’m back now, at least for a little while.”

He sighs. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah! I’m in great shape–  Dean? Is everything alright?”

He contemplates hanging up on her, disappointing yet another person that is left behind to deal with him post-Sam–  but it would be good for her, in the end. 

He doesn’t.

“It’s fine. On a hunt right now, actually. Can I call you back when I–  when we’re finishing up?’’

She pauses, her reply soft and yielding, and if she knows the lie. “Ok. You got it. But Dean?”

“Yeah?” he says, already sitting up. 

“Take care alright? We’ll talk soon.”

Dean feels affection, or at least the ghost of it, before saying a goodbye and hanging up before she can reply. He sets the phone down on the night table, stopping himself from hurling it against the wall in front of him. 

He completes several tasks without thinking: changing out of his suit, pulling on jeans and an undershirt and a flannel shirt, locating a silver knife from the side of his duffel, checking if it’s sharp on the side of his finger. He swallows back whatever bullshit is trying to weasel its way out his eyes and mouth and is out the door within the span of five minutes. 

He drives into the night, the Impala loud in the sleeping city. His arm throbs, the smooth patch of skin on his right forearm beating like a tattoo against his muscle and bone and he wishes he had a scar. At least he’d be able to see where the threat came from. 

Faded green signs lead him to the city’s old industrial section. He eases the Impala over the cracked driveways, pulling up to the factory’s breezeway, vines covering the hallway leading to a wide door. His boots crunch down on loose gravel, and he grips his knife hard enough to make his wrist hurt. 

Djinn are clever, and old as fuck usually, and Dean knows that hiding from normal law enforcement would be a cinch for them. The metallic smell of blood lingers in the air. He stands still, easing the door open with one hand. 

Manufacturing equipment sits dull and still in the darkness, save for the moonlight filtering in through the high windows. He tries to sharpen his vision, to listen for any creaks of rope or the slow steps of a monster–  but his senses are clouded over. He’s tired but adrenaline still pumps through him, keeping him upright and searching. 

The first floor is abandoned, that much is clear, so he finds the staircase and checks for a basement on a dust-covered directory. Two sub-basements–  one for storage and the other for the powerhouse of the factory. 

He looks up, starting to descend the stairs. When he rounds the corner, a figure stands at the bottom. 

There’s no light in the stairway, but Dean can make out the blue tinted skin and a face covered in tattoos from an orange exit light above its head. It cocks its head to the side, sizing Dean up, and he switches his grip on the knife in his hand–  it’s been months since he’s last seen a monster. 

As soon as Dean moves, skipping down the stairs two and a time, it takes off, skittering down the next flight into the first sub-basement. He follows it, shouldering his way through a door and into the pitch black basement. He stops, unable to even seen a hand in front of his face. He takes a few careful steps, allowing his eyes to adjust. 

He doesn’t see it until it’s right in front of him, taking his face into its clammy hands and backing Dean into the door with a bang. He struggles, but he’s not as strong as he used to be and the monster manages to tilt his head back, its blue eyes shining too brightly into Dean’s, forcing his to fall shut. 

Bright lights burst behind his eyes first, then sensation falls away. He watches scenes play before his eyes, some old memories–  some that have yet to happen and would never happen. Him and Sam on the road, having a beer on the hood of the Impala, watching the fireworks explode in an open field–  all seared into his mind with the feeling of euphoria and contentment all wrapped up in one. 

_What, like a vacation?_

He settles back into the feeling, letting it wash over him. He sees things as they used to be; he sees how he would smile and laugh with his brother, but something is missing. He searches through the memories, seeing flashes of someone else he thinks he knows–  a brief look into blue eyes, the swish of a tan coat as he leaves– 

He knows him. He knows that whoever has those blue eyes is real, is home and waiting for him, even if he’s probably a little pissed. He pulls away, watching Sam’s smiling face wilt in disappointment as it fades, replaced with another face, another voice–  one that calls for a mostly-wild cat at sundown and makes the weakest coffee Dean’s ever drank and kisses like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do– 

He lands back in his body with a jolt, air screaming through his lungs and a shock through his limbs as he pushes out, landing a hit on the monster’s abdomen and breaking its hold on him. It stumbles back, growling low in its throat as it rights itself slowly. Dean stoops down, grabbing the handle of the knife that had slipped from his grip. 

He rushes at the djinn while it still stands disoriented, sinking the knife into its abdomen. It screams out, but doesn’t fall, instead reaching down to yank the blade out. A blade that had never been dipped in lamb’s blood. 

Dean’s heart nearly beats out of his chest when the monster’s mouth cracks into a smile–  jeering and mocking enough. Dean turns on his heel and starts running, feet hitting the stairs hard enough to echo in the hallway, but the djinn pulls him back, arms around his middle. They fall, Dean’s stomach swooping. His legs tangle underneath him and he hears a crack as they both hit the stairs, followed by a searing pain in his right leg. 

He ignores it, heaving himself to a standing position and limping back towards the stairs while the monster is upended. He gets up the stairs, using the railings as a crutch and emerging back into the dark factory floor. He follows the light back to where the door is still cracked open, his leg growing more painful with every step. 

He feels the monster behind him before he sees it, and he curses djinn for being so quiet–  he’d do anything for a noisy, screeching spirit or an arrogant vampire–  the djinn, its only angle is you. 

He looks around, his knife long gone, and spots a heavy metal cart, probably used to carry heavy machinery back when the factory was alive. He grabs it, its wheels screeching and protesting. He pushes hard, and the djinn just watches, frozen and grinning at Dean. 

Dean sees Sam’s face again, bright and young and fresh, like he had been when Dean would spot him at Stanford, still in his car and afraid to disturb whatever paradise Sam had made for himself. The djinn keeps grinning, but Dean just tightens his grip on the cart. He swallows, forcing Sam’s face from his mind. 

His voice comes out a rasping whisper. 

“My brother’s dead, but I’m still alive, you fucking son of a bitch.”

He pushes, hurling the cart at the djinn and barely watching as it strikes it in the torso, sending him flying back towards the stairs, letting out a near deafening screech. 

He doesn’t stay to watch, knowing that nothing would kill the djinn. Instead he limps toward the door, taking gulps of the cold November air when he gets outside, flinging himself into the Impala and turning the key. Somehow he manages to handle the pedals with his broken leg on the gas, wincing as he reverses back onto the road. 

When he reaches a long stretch road, he finally looks down, feeling something wet drip down the leg of his pants. He fights off unconsciousness long enough to reach the Auburn city limits, grabbing his phone and pulling over to the shoulder. He tries to pull up a number, the only number he knows by heart these days, but instead sets his head down, the steering wheel digging into his forehead as he blacks out. 

 

* * *

 

_Dean wakes up to a feeling up emptiness, or rather, the feeling of cooling down. The heat that had plagued him for months, coursing through him and making him kill and maim and all the things Crowley wanted of him, is gone._

_He opens his eyes, hands aching where they’re still tied behind his back. He smells singed drywall and burning hair._

_“Come on, Sam.”_

_He looks up, his neck aching, but he can’t look away. Cas kneels on the floor, hunched over an unconscious Sam as if something is wrong. He lays his hands on his forehead, on his chest, on his wrists, light bursting from his palms. Bright, but not bright enough to blind him._

_“Come on!” Cas yells, “You’ve got to fight, Sam!”_

_Dean’s breath builds up in his chest, watching as Cas’s hands start to still._

_“Cas.”_

_Cas looks up, his mouth drawn and his eyes exhausted._

_“Cas, what’s wrong with him?”_

_“Dean,” Cas starts, and it’s a stalling tactic, and Dean’s very tired of all this name saying, “I’m so sorry.”_

 


	7. Chapter 7

The first thing Dean feels upon waking is a sharp, throbbing pain in his leg. 

“Get him on the stretcher! He’s lost a lot of blood!”

He hears a few voices, yelling back and forth, and through the black spots in his vision he sees the sun poking through the horizon, illuminating the sight of a State Trooper vehicle and an ambulance. A blonde-headed someone in a uniform leans over him, smiling reassuringly. 

“You’re going to be ok. You’re in good hands.”

Everything goes dark, and when he wakes again he’s inside the ambulance, speeding down the road with full sirens. The blonde woman is up front driving, and a man sits next to him, checking a screen before he notices Dean awake. 

“Good to see you awake! You’ve got a nasty break on your leg,” he says, smiling, “But we’ll get you patched up.”

Dean feels weak, like he could collapse the gurney he’s lying on with just the weight of his aching body. He looks down at his leg, seeing where his right pant leg had been cut away to reveal where the bone had poked through. Blood soaks the bandages and he fights back nausea. 

“Hey, hey, just relax man–”

“Cas,” Dean croaks out, stupidly, trying to find the words in his foggy brain, “Call my friend–”

The EMT fumbles around for a pen and paper as Dean spells out Cas’s name along with his number. He finishes writing and sticks the paper in his front pocket, promising to give it to the nurses at the hospital. 

Dean can only nod his assent, setting his head back and letting his eyes fall closed again. 

 

* * *

 

Something heavy presses over his eyes, keeping the world close and dark. The indiscriminate throbbing from before has been replaced with an aching centered in his right leg, sitting heavier and stiffer in scratchy sheets. With his eyes closed, he feels the world move around him and latches on to the first available and consistent rhythm he hears: soft breathing next to him as the fog begins to clear.

He opens his eyes. 

Bright, fluorescent lights blinding him before he adjusts, his eyes clearing. A heart rate monitor beeps steadily at his side while his right leg lies heavy in a blue cast on top of the scratchy hospital blankets. 

The source of the breathing sits in a chair to his left, head buried in his arms and sleeping soundly on the small area of mattress next to Dean’s hip. He wears a faded green t-shirt that’s been banging around Dean’s duffel for years, his back arched over the bed. 

Dean smiles, the oxygen tube pulling at his face before he eases it off, raising a tentative hand to place it on Cas’s shoulder. 

Cas snorts comically, jerking up and looking around like an old man. 

“I wasn’t asleep,” he says to no one in particular before snapping around to look at Dean, “You’re awake.”

“Guess I am,” Dean says, making an effort to sit up, his arms and leg protesting. 

Cas stands up, chair scraping, and eases Dean back into the bed. “You lost a lot of blood,” he says, “You’re going to feel weak for a few days.”

Dean sighs, closing his eyes in frustration. “How long have I been out?”

“You were in surgery.” Cas’s eyes flick toward Dean’s cast, “You got out about four hours ago.”

He nods, looking down at the blue hunk of plaster covering his leg. “What’s the verdict on the leg? They cutting it off?”

Cas shakes his head, disapproving but amused. “Clean break, but it breached the skin and you must've torn it up walking on it. That’s what caused the bleeding.”

Cas stops as if there is more to the story, instead he plays with a stray string from the ugly mauve blanket, eyes downcast. 

Dean clears his throat. “Just say it, Cas.”

Cas shakes his head, his lips pursed. Dean remembers how those lips had felt against his, how right it had felt in the dark before the sun had come up.

“They found four people inside an abandoned factory, tied up and suffering multiple puncture wounds, this morning. They’re all ok. Going to to be ok, I should say.” He says after a few minutes, an edge tainting his voice. “Somebody heard the sounds coming from the factory I guess. I’m guessing you didn’t have anything to do with that.”

“Not a thing.”

Cas huffs a laugh. “Did you kill the djinn?”

Dean shakes his head. “No. I–  I was stupid. Wasn’t prepared.”

Cas drops his head into his hands. “Dean–”

“Save the lecture,” Dean croaks, the edge in his voice making him cough. “I know it was stupid.”

“No,” Cas says, lifting his head and staring at him. “No it’s not that it’s–” He stops, swallowing hard. 

“What Cas?” Dean’s heart starts to pound. He blames leftover adrenaline. “Just spit it out you’re killing me here.”

“Before you left,” Cas starts, “I told you to let this thing with Sam go–  I shouldn’t have.”

Dean sighs. “You were right. You still are.”

“It wasn’t my place.”

“Then whose fucking place is it?” Dean says, dark laughter creeping from him, “You’re it, Cas. There’s no one else to save me from myself.”

Cas takes a deep breath, shuddering on the exhale. Charlie’s voice rings in Dean’s head, but he blocks it out, letting the beeping of the machines by his bed take over. 

“What happened on the hunt, Dean?” Cas asks, the words coming slow. 

Dean turns away, a frustrated noise bursting from him like a cornered dog. “It wasn’t the hunt. Should’ve been a piece of cake, like I told you. I got a call.”

He leans back in his chair. “From who?”

“Charlie.”

Cas’s face brightens, a smiling quirking at the corner of his mouth. “That’s great. Is she ok?”

“Yeah.” Dean nods. “She’s good. Back from Oz.”

Cas’s smile disappears. “I take it there’s more.”

Dean swallows, the words coming out without order. “Her number–  it came up strange–  it was an Unknown Number you know? And all this time, you know? Just surprised me–  she had been trying to reach me–  I had thought–”

He stops when Cas lays a hand on his arm. “It’s ok.”

Dean runs his tongue over his teeth, feeling like he’s coming out of his skin. “No, no it’s not–  because all these weeks were just for shit. Torturing myself, torturing you–”

“Don’t worry about that now,” Cas murmurs. “I’m just glad you’re alright.”

He reaches up, stopping halfway before pressing a hand to Dean’s face. Dean’s reminded of the motion Cas once used to heal him; getting in close, making sure Dean was ok when all he needed was a thought to make his body better. Dean leans into it, closing his eyes. Sam’s face flickers behind his eyes, frowning. 

A few moments go by, and Cas moves back when a doctor breezes into the room to check Dean’s leg and see that he’s awake. 

He stays close, though. Dean wishes he could introduce him as something–  a friend, a lover, a spouse–  but the words still and dry up in his mouth. Cas deserves better, but he can only give himself. 

 

* * *

 

The hospital keeps him for another three days, the nurses fussing over him and Cas both in some sort of fluttery, pro-homo frenzy that you just don’t see in central Kansas that much. They leave with a pair of crutches and orders to stay off the leg, with the recommendation that Dean find a doctor to remove the cast and prescribe physical therapy. 

Cas had picked up the Impala at the impound lot while Dean was in surgery, and Dean finds it mostly untouched. Apparently no one in Auburn had made the connection that he had been the FBI agent asking about the missing persons. Sometimes a little bit of luck lands on your side. 

Cas drives carefully, taking his turns as if Dean’s leg is made of glass now. He doesn’t talk much, just to ask Dean if he needs a break before he pulls over and rushes to help with his crutches. He only touches him like a nurse–  a hand under his arm or around his shoulder–  nothing like the lack of personal space they had shared before Dean had left. In one sense, he’s grateful for the simplicity; in another, he can hardly stand it.

They make it back in under three hours, not bad considering Dean needs frequent breaks for his stiff leg. He scoffed at the doctor when she had originally offered him a wheelchair, but now it doesn’t sound so bad compared to the soreness forming under his arms. 

It’s low tide, and the crash of the surf seems far away as he swings himself up to the porch, nearly collapsing onto the stairs. He sits, lowering his head to rest on his cast, catching his breath. 

He feels a soft push against his back, and Ruth emerges from behind him, all purrs and softness for a change. 

“Well someone’s warming up to me,” he mutters, scratching behind her ears. 

“Mara fed her while we were gone,” Cas explains as he walks up the path, Dean’s duffel in hand. Dean notes that he hadn’t brought anything with him, having hopped on the bus to Auburn as soon as he got the call. “She’s a good neighbor.”

“Yep.” Dean scratches Ruth’s neck, too tired to explain the information Tamara had given him. 

Cas stands awkwardly at the stoop, leaning against the railing. 

“Are you hungry?”

“Not really.”

“You should eat.”

“Probably.”

Cas scratches behind his head. “I’ll go make you something.”

Cas can pour cereal and make Easy-Mac in the microwave–  this Dean knows–  but he lets him go anyway, wanting relief from the charge left in the air. Dean doesn’t blame him for keeping his distance; how do you help someone so fucked up? Where do you even start?

His phone still sits like a brick in his pocket, dead now. He ignores it, hobbling to his feet and following Cas inside. Ruth follows at his heels, catching the door just before it swings shut. 

Cas is at the sink, washing a frying pan that was dirty when Dean had left for the hunt five days ago. Cas sets it on the stove, cracking five eggs into it fast enough that Dean _knows_ there’s gotta be a shell in there somewhere. 

“You know,” Dean says, “The last time I had a broken leg I got to lay around and watch soap operas all day.”

Cas turns the gas on, fiddling with the heat. “I don’t remember you ever breaking a leg.”

Dean stares at him, willing him to look up. “It was when you were Emmanuel, I guess.”

Cas tenses at that. He goes over to the stove, stirring the eggs. “We would need a TV for that.”

Dean shrugs. “I hadn’t thought about getting one before.”

“Me neither. I used to enjoy it.”

Silence. Dean’s eyes wander, fixing on a table in the corner of the kitchen. A light wood tabletop with blue-painted legs and four blue chairs to match. He makes his way over to it, running a hand over the smooth wood.

“When did you get this?” he asks.

“The day you left,” Cas answers, “It wasn’t cheap, but we needed a table and I thought it would be better to get something that would last.”

“That was smart,” Dean murmurs.

Cas keeps stirring. “They called from the mattress warehouse. There’s a delay on the bed we ordered.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes.” Cas stops stirring, his shoulders tense. “I’m sorry.”

Dean’s halfway down into a chair, wishing he hadn’t started sitting so he could make a getaway. Too late now.

“For what?”

He shuts the heat off, the eggs still runny in the pan. “I don’t know.”

Dean runs a hand through his hair, blowing out air. “We left a few things unsettled, didn’t we?”

Cas turns around, leaning against the far counter. “I believe you called it ‘tabling,’” he says with air quotes.

Dean’s exhale comes out like a laugh. “Yeah, yeah I did.”

“I don’t want to pressure you,” Cas says quietly.

Dean doesn’t respond, the heaviness in his chest rivaling the heaviness of the cast on his leg. 

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to tiptoe around me. Like anytime you say something I’m gonna get up and leave.”

Cas smirks sarcastically. “Well, you did.”

“I’m not gonna do it again,” Dean replies quickly. “But there’s still a fight out there, I can’t always forget.”

Cas shakes his head. “Dean, we’re not fighting for the world anymore. We’re not even fighting to save ourselves.”

Dean slams a hand on the table, the legs scraping against the ground. “There’s _always_ someone to save, Cas. No amount of self-inflicted isolation can change that.”

“Am I isolating you, Dean?”

“No! Jesus _fucking_ Christ, Cas–”

“Then what am I doing that scares you so much?”

“What are you _doing?_ ” Dean yells, his eyes burning, “You mean _everything_ to me! Do you know what happens to people that mean something to me?”  


Cas looks shaken, his eyes dark. “I’m not going anywhere, Dean.”

“You say that, but–” he stammers, “You gave up _heaven_ for this. For all the life of me I can’t figure out why you don’t hate me.”

“I’m a victim of a certain set of circumstances, Dean. Circumstances I _chose_ for myself. Don’t ask me to leave you, not when everything has led up to this.”

“I get it. You don’t have to explain it.” Dean rests his head in a hand, resting an elbow on the table. 

Cas comes over to him, his footsteps soft on the floor before he sits. “I don’t think you do.”

Dean shakes his head before he feels his arm being pulled out from under his chin, Cas taking hold of his and hanging on. 

“You wouldn’t get it, I understand. I may be human now, but that doesn’t mean I understand the subtleties. The way you’re supposed act when you… when you want someone to stay–  to stay indefinitely.”

He squeezes his hand. “Dean, I– “ he stops, looking down, “You mean everything to me. You said this to me but you could never imagine that I would feel the same way, even after the other night. When you left I felt like I couldn’t breathe–  not because you chose to leave–  but because you thought I would try to stop you. That I wasn’t worthy of that trust. That I wasn’t worthy of worrying about you.”

Dean’s throat feels thick. “Cas.”

Cas shrugs, continuing, “I spent so much time worrying about you. Sam and I followed you around the country–  watching you do what you did and I never stopped worrying. I was selfish. Even after I figured out what Sam was planning. I wanted you back too much.”

“I don’t blame you for that,” Dean says quietly.

“I know you don’t,” Cas says, smiling sadly, “You’re too busy blaming yourself.”

Dean rubs the back of his neck, feeling like he’s just run a marathon. 

“I think I need a minute.” He nods, more to himself. He grabs his crutches, pulling himself to his feet. “I need to think.”

“Dean, you don’t have to leave– “

“I’m not leaving,” he says, his resolve firm even as his voice shakes. “There’s something I need to do. I’ll be back, I promise.”

Cas nods, and Dean can feel his eyes watching him as he walks out the door.

 

* * *

 

It’s a short walk from the house, not even a quarter mile. It would feel even shorter if Dean’s leg weren’t broken and he didn’t have to navigate the semi-wooded area with crutches. He’s still astounded by the Maine coastline; wooded like a forest and rocky like a mountain before subsiding into beach. 

For now, he keeps his eyes forward, looking for the tell-tale sign. It starts to reveal itself after ten minutes of limping: A patch a grass burned away by fire, left still and stark by the cold weather.

He slows down, moving gingerly towards the dry patch as if it were a personal threat to his well-being. He sets his crutches against the tree, lowering himself to sit in the brush. There’s evidence left there, grass that struggled to grow back and blackened soil, but you wouldn’t know that there had been a fire there unless, of course, you knew. He digs his hands into the dirt. His cast is getting dirty, he knows, and he’ll be picking dirt and broken leaves out of it for days. 

He remembers the numbness, how his body had felt without the Mark of Cain after being a demon for so long. How purposeless it felt, like he had been thrown back into a human body without all his old motivations, all his old drive. He couldn’t feel anger, it was too intense. 

Sam’s body had been so light between him and Cas, but thinking back, he thinks Cas simply just took most of the weight from him. Cas had cleaned the blood from Sam’s eyes and mouth before wrapping him in a white sheet from the linen closet, nicer that the tarp in the back of the Impala, but still old and frayed in spots. 

The kitchen table had been worn enough to the point where the lacquer had mostly been gone, and the wood was dry and warped anyway. All this Cas had said while they were dragging it out to the woods, the surf beating on the beach behind them. The explanation hadn’t even been necessary, Dean couldn’t have cared about burning the table even if he had tried. 

He clears his throat, voice shaking when he starts talking. 

“Sammy,” he starts, “I’m shit at this stuff- you know that. But I figure I owe it to you.”

He looks out at the ocean through the trees, a group of five or so gulls waddling on the sand and looking for food. Dean figures they’re not the brightest of the bunch, no one’s dropping food on this end. 

“You’re gone,” he says, and somehow, it hurts more now than when he had yelled it at the djinn. 

Tears spill down his face, hot and messy. He wipes them away with a swipe of his hand. “You would have like it here. Loved it. Probably would have found someone here. Maybe even Mara–  you two could have been giants together…”

“But you’re gone,” he says again, “But I’m still here. Cas and I–  we want to build a life. _I_ want to make a life here, I should say. I–  don’t think I can just do it to make Cas happy. I think that I have to try to be happy too.

“I _want_ to be happy, I mean.”

The trees answer with a shudder of leaves, the last of them before the big fall before winter. A shiver runs down Dean’s spine, and he leans back against the trunk, a smile breaking on his face. 

“I guess I regret that I never told you. You would have been such a dork about it, spouting off crap about how happy you would be for us, me and Cas I mean.”

A fly lands on his hand. He swats it away. “I’m sorry my last words to you were as a demon. But maybe we can replace them with these, yeah? You had to have made it to heaven, being the boy who shut down hell and all.

“Probably seems crazy–  but I’m glad we stayed here. Not that there’s a good reason, or even one that makes sense. We’ve been running away from mom and dad’s graves for so long, maybe it’s better to stick with you. Try to make home around it.”

Dean feels complete, and he can’t think of any other words that would express what he feels. He grabs his crutches, hoisting himself up. He winces, pain shooting through his leg. 

“Goddamit it all,” he mutters, but despite it all, he has a burst of energy. 

Getting back to the house takes less time than before, it seems. He thinks about the summer, how nice it will be to sit on the beach when it isn’t radiating cold. How Cas will bend down and examine the inhabitants of tide pools as if they were gold. How Cas’s skin will tan light brown and maybe Charlie will visit. Maybe Jody and Alex too. 

Maybe they can make new memories. 

Cas is leaning against the side of the house when he gets back, looking back towards the road as if Dean had left again. He looks at Cas, from the frayed bottom of his jeans to the worn collar of his flannel shirt, not warm enough for the bone-chilling November air. His hair curls behind his ears in want for a trim and Dean knows now that his hand fits _just so_ with his own. Looking at Cas feels like looking forward, like looking at a gentler time that could be the rest of his life. 

Dean wants him–  in any capacity. 

“Hey!” he calls, a smile breaking out on his face. It feels stiff and out of place, but he thinks that he could get used to smiling, in time. 

Cas looks his way, shoulders sagging in relief. He waits for Dean to make his way to him, face breaking into a smile. He catches Dean by the shoulders when he finally makes it, steadying him and bringing one hand up to cup his face. 

“Dean I–” he starts, voice breathless, “Can I–  I want–”

“Will you kiss me, Cas?” he cuts him off, covering his hand with his, “I’ve wanted to kiss you again so much.”

Cas’s smile is nothing short of radiant before he dips forward, bringing their lips together in a slow slide that makes Dean melt to his core. He shudders. Cas’s mouth is chilled from the air but warming up every moment as they kiss. Dean grabs hold of Cas’s shirt, urging him closer until they’re pressed together from their lips to the tops of their thighs.

Cas steers him away from the spot, holding him upright, holding him together. He leans Dean back against the wall of the house, stroking his hair back and wiping the tears from his face. _It’s ok I’m here_ becomes a mantra, and after a while Cas’s lips replace his hands again. Dean grabs for him, holding him close enough to hurt. 

“Are we ever going to be ok?” Dean asks, breathing hard and resting his head against Cas’s neck. 

“I don’t know–” Cas says, holding his waist with strong and sure hands, rubbing through the thick fabric of his jacket. His voice shakes, but it’s a voice Dean can believe in. 

“We can try.”

Dean nods, bringing his hands up to run through Cas’s hair. He tastes salt on his own lips, chased from Cas’s only a moment ago from the salted air. Cas’s eyes shine even in the dimness of the evening, and Dean wants to get him inside. Get him someplace warm where he can lay him down and show him wonderful things that can come with being human. 

For now, Cas turns, leaning against the house while keeping a firm grip on Dean’s hand. The tide starts to creep in as they watch, bringing them closer and closer to the sea. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I started this story by opening a document, typing out the words "something by the ocean dammit" and then promptly closing the document to work on other projects. I have wanted to put Dean and Cas in an ocean setting for a while now, the setting itself promoting so much healing and serenity that I thought it would be the perfect spot for them to retire after so much trauma. The coast of Maine has brought me so much joy in my life, and I hope you have enjoyed seeing our faves try to carve out a space for themselves in the real world as much as I have enjoyed creating it. Thank you for reading, and comments are not only appreciated but are cherished. If you'd like feel free to follow or reach out to me on tumblr at destielpasta.tumblr.com. <3<3


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